Archive for the ‘Nonclassified Nonsense’ Category

A couple of weeks ago, I arrived at work to find Michele complaining about how one of her new yearling ewes was attacked. She was still alive but not in great shape. I helped Michele catch her to give her a dose of penicillin. She had a puncture in her rear leg that was oozing red serum every time she moved, and her throat had been slashed. Michele said she could see saliva running down out of the slash. All I knew is that it was a bad wound, but the fact that the ewe was giving us a hard time catching her was a good sign that she wasn’t dead yet. Michele gave her another shot a couple of days later. She seems to be doing fine now. Still, Michele has been keeping her and her “brother” (I call him that, even though they’re not related that closely, because they look alike), who we have high hopes of being the next ram, in the little sheep pen by the small arena, far away from hungry coyotes.

It seemed Daisy, the new sheep “guarding” donkey, wasn’t up to the job. She just doesn’t seem to like hanging out with the sheep.

Eli left for the Olympics yesterday. The night before, we threw him a reception after the Saturday evening service at his church. I was there to help out, and his wife Cami made sure Duncan, Michele, and I were there plenty early. We were so early, in fact, that we had time to get smoothies at the church’s cafe. Three Peach Plantation Smoothies later, our frozen beverage purchases had also qualified us for the weekly “sweepstakes” for a Target $15 gift certificate. There was one other entry in the jar when Duncan dumped our three tickets in, and I told him I thought our chances of winning it were pretty good. He looked at me incredulously. Sometimes I get a feeling about these sorts of things, and I knew I was going to win. Those of you who know me know I’m philosophically a pessimist, so you may be surprised to hear I even started spending it in my mind.

The next day I had a voice mail saying I had indeed won the gift certificate. I could pick it up next week at church.

This morning I proudly announced to Duncan that I’d won. He told me he had some news too. On Saturday night after they’d come home and gone to bed, the donkey started braying like crazy. Duncan said he would have slept right through it, but the Harmons were staying there, and Mark Harmon woke him up. They each took a portable spotlight.

There in the sheep pen was a mountain lion chowing down on the whether. Duncan grabbed the thirty-ought six. Mark pointed his spotlight at the cat’s forehead, and Duncan took aim. The cat stared at them with a caught-in-the-headlights look. Duncan hit him right between the eyes, one perfect shot.

They skinned the cat and butchered what was left of the sheep. The Division of Wildlife came out and filled out a report, giving ample credit to Daisy the Donkey and taking away the skin. It will be auctioned off, and the Bremers plan to bid on it. Max wants it for Beniah (get him used to killed lions and stuff). The next day Bob brought his rotisserie over and grilled lamb. No sense letting good food go to waste.

Duncan is now the hero of the neighborhood. Some people down the road lost an llama last week, and the Delacroces have been missing cattle.

But of course, most of the credit goes to Daisy. Although, she still doesn’t hang out with the sheep.

Here’s a picture of the big cat. The blood is all from the sheep. As you can see, Duncan is still in his bathrobe, and Mark is presumably still dutifully shining his light on the lion’s head.

I think I probably would be too.

So, in case you haven’t noticed, it’s come to light that Fox news has essentially been saying whatever the White House wants them to say.

Why doesn’t Fox just come out and say, “News for and by crazy neo-conservatives!”, or “News the President wants you to know!”?

My favorite bit is that Bill O’Reilly claimed in 2006 that no such thing was going on, while Scott McClellan admits to doing it.

[Editors note: For some reason this post has no stylistic value whatsoever, despite the grandeur the author imagined in his head before engaging in a spastic typing frenzy. The text is jumpy, the transitions are nonexistent, and perhaps the author should reconsider writing. In general. But it’s what you get for tonight.]

Since Jonah couldn’t get here to visit, I had to entertain myself. Yesterday, I managed to convince Sydney to brunch with me at Miriam’s, which has excellent Israeli breakfasts, but after coming home she passed out in front of MLB.com. After consulting the internets, I discovered that She & Him was playing in Manhattan. Tickets were $25, though, and that’s just more than I’m generally willing to spend to go see a band. $15 is generally my limit, but I would only be buying one ticket, so I considered it. I also discovered that the Celebrate Brooklyn festival was going on. The Ani DiFranco concert we went to last year was part of the same festival. There were three free bands playing in Prospect Park, so I decided to head down there. Had I realized the chick from Lavender Diamond is singing backup vocals on the She & Him tour, I might have reconsidered. But I didn’t realize that until today.

I considered waking Sydney from her baseball slumber to see if she’d join me, but it looked to be a hopeless cause. I knew enough to actually study a map of Prospect Park before setting off this time, since the only way we found the bandshell last time was by following the lesbians. Lesbians will always lead you to an Ani concert, but no such luck with the fans of The Jealous Girlfriends. There may be a progression there, though…

I took the Prospect Park shuttle to, well, Prospect Park. It deposited me on the wrong side of prospect park, but I knew how to get to the other side from the map in my head. The map only included the roads, though, not all the crazy little walking paths, so I had to stick to the major roads, which was pretty close to the shortest way through the park anyway. It’s not like there were cars to worry about, just mad bicyclists.

I found the bandshell, presented my driver license at an “ID station” for the privilege of having a green paper band attached to my wrist. The beer choices were the same as last year: Bud flavors or Red Hook. Red Hook is too bitter, but I’ll take it over Budweiser. I found a seat off to one side and engaged in some random texting while waiting for the music to start.

The Jealous Girlfriends are fronted by a chick who rocks, and as I’ve mentioned before, I like chicks who rock. There was no bass guitar, so the keyboardist (who had two keyboards) played the bass line. At one point, I was surprised at how much the keyboard sounded like a bass guitar, and only then did I stop staring at the chick who rocked long enough to notice that the keyboardist had wholly abandoned his keyboards and had picked up a bass guitar. Then the chick who rocked put down her guitar and played the keyboard for awhile. I’m not sure what the Indie rock fascination is for strange sounding vocals. On one of the songs, the chick who rocked put down her guitar and played keyboard. While hardly uncommon, I like it when bands switch. I think the Jealous Girlfriends could use a full time bass, though.

After the Jealous Girlfriends came Ghostland Observatory, which turned out to be a really annoying electro-hip-hop. From Austin. Not even from Brooklyn, so I don’t know what they were doing there. Fortunately, Anjeanette texted me back about this time to let me know that she was drinking at a particular intersection in Brooklyn.

After consulting Sydney’s Street-wise Brooklyn which I’d thoughtfully tucked into my shorts pocket, [A side note: Street-Wise maps rock. I highly recommend them if you plan to attempt on-foot navigation of any city in the world. They produce the only map of Rome I’ve ever thought was any good. Jonah and I buy them for any major city we plan to be walking around. They’re available at most bookstores.] I was able to successfully walk to the specified intersection.

I was under the impression that there was a bar. There was no bar. There was a hardware store. Anjeanette appeared from the other side of the street and escorted my inside. I met all sorts of people I didn’t know, and eventually came to understand that I was at a birthday party for someone I didn’t know.

It turned out to be fun anyway. Eventually, I walked out into the back ‘yard’, where a girl yelled my name. Turned out to be Anjeanette’s friend Jan, who also went to UD, but I was totally incapable of remembering her at all, presumably because I’m just that bad at social interaction. She was unable to specify where and how she’d met me, though it’s been determined that she was at several “parties” at my apartment. Very strange to be recognized by a strange girl in a strange city.

After some interesting discussions about Oklahoma, arranged marriage, the natural unsuitability of humanity to monogamy, middle-school Facebook friends and shin-kicking; as well as some healthy consumption of alcohol, I decided to head back to Sydney’s apartment. I managed to find a westbound F train which took me to an eastbound A train which took me there. There being south of where I started.

New York, despite all its claims to diversity is astoundingly segregated. Brooklyn is mostly segregating along north/south lines because the trains run east/west. Manhattan is segregated into poorly defined clumps. It’s not obvious looking at a map where Little Italy stops and Chinatown starts, but when you’re walking down the street and all the signs are in Chinese, it’s a bit more obvious.

I fly again tomorrow. It’s the beginning of my “line”. This means I’m not on reserve any longer. The company can, theoretically, only make me fly flights that it told me about a good while in advance. My schedule, through most of August, is now on Facebook. When I get my next line award, there will be more schedule up there.

I nearly didn’t get to work on Thursday. I was originally scheduled for a reserve shift that started at 11am on Thursday, followed by a flight to Houston that departed at 7:30pm. Realizing that they mostly needed me for the Houston flight and that the reserve period was a “just in case” addition to my schedule which existed merely because they could, I thought I’d call and ask a favor. I requested that they shift my reserve period to 2pm, because that would allow me to take the 8am flight to work and give me an additional day at home. Shockingly, the request was approved.

On Wednesday, though, I discovered endless problems with the weather in the Northeast. My mother didn’t get on the direct flight to Minneapolis that she’d wanted to get on, but did get on a later flight to Cincinnati. Which canceled after taxiing around for 3 hours.

Recognizing this might affect me, I started looking at the flight from JFK-DEN that night, because it was the plane I’d be taking out in the morning. If it came in substantially late, I knew that 14 CFR §121.471 specifies that a crew needs at least 8 hours of rest in the 24 hours prior to the completion of any scheduled flight in order for the flight to depart. Basically, I knew the flight was going to be late. Maybe even canceled.

So I decided to take the JetBlue that leaves at 12:55am. The JetBlue site said it was delayed an hour, so I packed and then checked it again before I got dressed to leave. It was canceled.

So I called crew tracking and confessed my problem. They told me to do the best I could do, and listed me on the flight out of Denver. The one I was going to try to take, but which was likely going to be too late.

When I got up Thursday morning I discovered that the flight was indeed canceled. I went to the airport for the 7:30am United flight. I was the 5th pilot waiting for the Jumpseat, and the flight was oversold. I obviously didn’t get on. I didn’t get on the next flight either, but somehow I managed to get on the next flight to LGA. I ran into another Freedom pilot who was also trying to get to JFK. We split a discount cab from LGA-JFK so it only cost each of us $10.

I got to JFK at about 5:30pm for my 2:00pm reserve time. Fortunately, I was in time for my scheduled flight, so no one seemed too upset.

I can’t wait to find out how bad the flights are in the winter.

Well, I got up at 4:30 this morning and drove to Denver. I didn’t get on the Delta flight to JFK at 8, and then I didn’t get on the 11:10 flight to Cincinnati. Berck said I had a good chance of getting on the next flight to Cincinnati this afternoon that would get me into LGA late tonight, but he’d also said that about the other flights. All I wanted to do was go home and crawl back in bed, so I gave up.

Eli leaves next week for China. We’re all very excited.

USA Today had an article today taken from Eli’s blog post. They’ve also got his blog on their Sports page with a cool picture of him.