Wilkommen to ze Beach!

UP AT 6.30am TODAY so that we could spend the whole day at the beach. Not by choice, mind: but work. Not even my own. Today was the annual company picnic, and since 'tis my Goddess who plans these picnics for her small insurance broker company - and their matching Xmas parties too - it was a day spent on final preparations and running Point. It does not matter that the actual events are executed and catered by hired professionals: somebody has to provide the Vision. Somebody has to be the Company Rep: somebody has to tell them what they've all to do, who's all coming; somebody has to provide the booze and the ice and the giveaways and the prizes for them to administer. Somebody has to mind the door, tred the floor, socialize, answer questions, deal with issues: somebody has to be the company Face. Somebody has to tidy up afterwards.

Still, it's a day on the beach. A private, fenced-off, beer-and-wine-licensed party on a glorious burning-bright Will Rogers State Beach. That's in Santa Monica, case I didn't tell you - Los Angeles County jurisdiction. I think I've mentioned nannyfascist LA County before, and their maniform rules and prohibitions? Every year provides another twist; but then, Councils have to justify themselves somehow don't they? What's the point of having Power if you can't make rules with it? To recap: the permit for the party, which includes a license to provide beer and wine to guests and allows them to drink it - no hard liquor, mind, so margarita machines are strictly verboten - the permit requires that the area be fenced-off and patrolled by hired security guards of a number dependent on how many people are supposed to turn-up (one of their functions - and I am so totally not kidding - is to make sure nobody who may be intoxicated tries to walk across nearby Pacific Coast Highway, PCH). You are also required to hire a Lifeguard for the day, who will sit between your fence and the ocean watching for trouble. This year drinkers of alcohol were obliged to wear a bright pink wriststrap that could not be removed without tearing. Only one strap was permitted to be issued per person, and only people wearing the pink straps could be given alcohol. BUT: nobody wearing a pink strap was allowed to set foot in the water. I mean, not even a toe: and the lifeguard was there to enforce it.

I always feel so much safer knowing Nanny is watching-out for me, don't you? Here on the very edge of the Free World the local authorities like to proffer a taste of the all-knowing all-powerful socialitarianism one is likely to encounter in the Asian states at the other edge of the ocean. I think that's nice: they can be so thoughtful at times. It's as though they've sat down and thought: Someone might depart Santa Monica in a blow-up Kontikki Raft one day and set sail for the Horizon. Wouldn't it be nice if they were ready-acclimatized for the Far Side? Wouldn't be such a shock to their systems then. Like those times you visit the theater, pop outside for a smoke at half-time? When the guards do not let you leave if you happen to be carrying any other drink than coffee? Might be alcohol! and everyone knows it is against the law to drink alcohol-like beverages outside in Los Angeles. Nanny knows best.

All the more surprising, then, that I'm allowed to sit six hours in Los Angeles County sunshine - doubled-dosed by reflection off the sand - to sit six hours in that without a hint of sunscreen? Way I figure it my wonderful first wife spent her whole short life under the grey-gloom clouds of east-central Scotland, and died one winter of malignant metastatic melanoma. I, at least, want to be sure I've earned it should the same thing happen to me. Tomorrow, out diggin' and fixin' in the garden, tomorrow I'll wear sunscreen: but that's because I've burnt my arse off today. I'm glowing, radiating, as I type. It was magnificently hot today, with just a taint of breeze coming off the Pacific. One of those strange and unexpected inversions: strangers naturally associate California with sunshine and surf-booming beaches, but for the most part the California coastline is surprisingly cold and gloomy: you want Sun, head inland to the valleys, where I live. The coast has the marine layer to keep it cool, and the Pacific to keep it cloudy and weathered. The ocean itself is not very warm - freezin g to us, in fact. It's temperature is somewhere in the low-to-mid fifties supposedly, but since outside the ocean on the beach is in the nineties, that's like a forty degree difference. So it's cold. Oh forgoodnesssake NOOOO!, my constant-whiner auld scottish friend, it surely is not as cold as the North Sea. But then again, What the hell is, in your mind? Some folk never let up. Some folk, they landed in this country no matter how many years ago, the sausages, the beans, will always have been better back in Scotland and the sea will always have been colder. Nothing can ever diminish these facts, and nobody is permitted to not hear them. Americans - my wife included - are familiar with this phenomenon. Their answer - as indeed is hers, and nowadays my own - is simply Go Back! Or shut the f**k up! Always with the choice. Quite.

I didn't spend the whole day just sitting in the sun, no. Spent an hour at least stood at waters edge in amongst the broken surf. Fascinating, mesmerising, just standing in the rush of surf watching the swirl and foam, trying to predict the high ones that reach up past your knees; figuring it ain't so easy to do that? It's not like you just watch for the big waves coming in: these invariably break early anyhow. You expect a large wash, but it doesn't happen. Then, totally unexpected, you'll be very-nearly swept off your feet from behind, by water going back out that barely broke your ankles on the way in? Thus the swirl of competing forces: water coming in always meets water going out, and where they meet they break and pull the sand up with them. But it isn't just water coming in and going out; it's sections of water coming in and going out at different angles all at once. The wettest events seem to occur when an incoming wave arrives early, before the last has had a chance to run back out again. Water on water, soaken pants. How easy it is, you allow yourself, for your mind to drift and gambol away with the waves; to daydream and stare at the patterns. To become immersed, though not physically? You can do this at any beach on any sea in any country: but there is something undeniably fantastic about soaking your toes in the Pacific, on a beach in Santa Monica, fully past caring about anything. No matter what my nanny says.

[I'll put pictures up in the morning - my other PC's are too busy right now to be loading the camera]

Let Down Your Hair

RAMBLING TALE TONIGHT, inconsequential chit-chat spun, gold into straw, and drawn over several half-arsed sessions never quite completed. Rather like the subject matter. Like some old and fat Rapunzel I sit at my wheel spinning and dreaming for a thousand and one nights, never quite able to finish anything. If only I knew his true name?...

Hoose

It'll be another month before the kitchen cabinets arrive - my birthday! Hooray! - but that's okay: it felt good tearing the old ones down. Gives us plenty of time to move gas pipes and electrical outlets. I was going to say we were half-way done, but that'd be wrong. Maybe two-fifths? We have floors tiled in our new main living space, and slowly-but-surely we're populating it with furniture and rugs and cable and other essentials. As of last Thursday night it became officially habitable: we have the seating, we have the wall-mounted TV with hidden wires, we have the new cable box and DVD installed. True, there are a ton of boxes lying around: a mix of old bitty stuff we didn't want to part with - books, CD's, DVD's, dinner sets, silverware, whatnots and gizmos - the old familiars that used to inhabit bookshelves-cupboards-drawers of the Gone now stacked in twenty-odd small boxes; and mixed with these a teen of bigger boxes, new boxes, some empty, others not, containing new furniture - tables, chairs, wall mountings - in various states of unassembly. But we do have comfy chairs and a television, the essential makings of a Family room.

What we don't have - yet - is a mindset to go with it. For all of our past years, the growing years, the destructor years, for all those years we've pretty-much lived in a different room: the old family room. Or as some might have it, the real family room. It is to this presently-bare and uncarpeted room that we have always gravitated, and still do. The puppy lives there; given the run of two scraped-out rooms for his hobbledy klip-klop but shuttered behind doors. The cat hates him, but he, perversely, loves her and runs barking and yelping for her any opportunity he gets. Half the time he runs right past her, unseeing. For a little guy with only three good legs he can fairly belt up the stairs, faster than any of us. So for now we keep him in the old room, and he is our excuse to remain sat there. "Puppy needs company." Sure he does, but that's not the real reason you won't move through to the comfortable seats, is it?

Old habits won't change their spots or learn new tricks. The only one I care about moving to the new abode is my belovèd, my Goddess, around whose knees I live to clasp my arms. And me: my recovering herniated spine and nerve-damaged arms can't take much more of those plastic chairs. I need to get out of that room. The Spawn can go hang - take their filthy raging hormones back to the bat caves where they belong. Because Old Habits blah-di-blah they are not welcome in our new space; or at least, that's what they're being told. It is important to set the tone from the outset. But five careless thoughtless teenagers can devastate a household just as quickly and efficiently as the five growing children they hatched out of. All of this newness, all of this cleanness, this polished wax and sparkling glass - it sings to the Horde like a gaping wound to a cloud of blowflies.

Gerdin

They can live in the yard, now that it's been cleared and looks so tidy and so minimalist. Second thoughts - No - it's too tidy for them now: they'd only break it. We finally had to tell the gardeners to STOP RIGHT THERE!, to PACK YOUR TOOLS AND TIDY YOUR SHIT AND JUST GO! Their idea of Cost turned out to be very different from ours, and money was cascading daily from our pockets to theirs, faster than the coal-dark water they left us with is now draining out the pool and down the street. Bloody Hell: when you tell the guy, Saturday, "$1000 more and that must be it" but he comes back Sunday and says "That cost $1,900. Oops." and the pool guy has arrived meantime and told you $500 to drain and clean the fecher, then it is surely time to let the Gardeners go. To think it began one Saturday afternoon a month ago when we asked for a tentative estimate to clear-away a couple of trees from the side of the house. The job just ballooned out of all control and proportion. So much work has been done there, and so much space revealed: it really does look good. But, since the Gardeners have cleaned us out, it's up to us to replant it now, and up to me to try to get the sprinklers working again. Bugger. I'm useless enough with my hands as it is, but far, far worse in horticulture situations. Our sprinkler system here is - literally - in with the bricks. Which is to say it is buried: sometimes under lawn, more often under brickwork. The front and side sections are working, and but for two or three replacement heads that various passersby have trampled to death, I don't have too much to do to that part. Oh, but there is this one valve out front which definitely works - you can hear the water flowing, you get soaked by the spray from the release nozzle - but no actual sprinklers sprinkle, so we've no idea where that water is going. The backyard sprinkler system, other hand, is totally busted. There are three sprinkler valves that I can find, all of them stuck under a tree. Only one of them was working but it did not drive the heads we needed - that whole row that runs along the back hedge and into our new planting area. There was, however, an obvious leak underground, right at the valves. So I dug down to the pipes. Or tried to. Being situated at the foot of a tree means the pipes are wrangled and mangled by inches-thick impenetrable tree roots. So although I dug down and did find the pipes, and although I even exposed a huge hole at the first bend, I couldn't uncover more than a few inches of length because of the roots. Enough to fix upon the direction the broken pipe was headed and to locate the spot - right at the pool pump thirty feet away - where the pipe came back out the ground and into the concrete, clearly on its way to the back hedge. I fixed it! Me! I procured the necessary hardware all by myself. I cut the broken pipe above ground at either end, purchased a spanking-new valve, discovered our Gardener puts a 200% mark-up on replacement brass sprinkler valves, and ran new pipe above ground this time so it would not get tangled again. Great: beautiful job, though I say so myself. Turn on the water, twist the manual valve release - feching thing only drives one single solitary lonely head at the near corner of the yard. Bastards! All that work for the wrong valve! But wait... there's more. Twist the knob on the other valve, the other "broken" valve, and water starts spewing out the sawn-off end of the underground pipe I'd just cut! Classic situation comedy visual gag, rather like when Rodney and Del Boy and Grandpa in "Only Fools and Horses" are taking down that chandelier, with Rodney and Del Boy stood underneath on ladders to catch it, Grandpa unscrewing the bolts in the attic, only for a different chandelier unnoticed in the background to come crashing to the floor.

Idiot! I felt such a twally. To recover I ran to the hardware store and bought 200 feet of that porous sweating hose that intentionally leaks all its length, ran it from the sawn-off pipe all around the back fence to the faraway plantation spot. So at least we have some water seeping where we need it. All those new plants we've bought might just stand a chance.

Escape

All of this has taken its toll: we needed a break. We needed to get oot the hoose and run away for a couple of days. Vegas beckoned. We thought we'd be good and take four of the kids with us, a final fling before school starts, and we'd even planned to leave Sunday night and return on Tuesday so that one of the boys, who works in the Library, he could come too after finishing work on Sunday. Cometh the day of course and both boys decided that laying claim to some good High School locker real estate was far more important than any poxy trip to Vegas with the parents, so the bastards decided not to come with us at all but to stay with Grandma along with eldest son who either has to work or to attend Community College every day. If only those boys were so gung-ho about actual school work as they are about acquiring prestigious lockers? As things stand, we can at least be thankful that funding college for five kids will likely not be the huge financial burden we'd always imagined. If our eldest is any indicator even Community College might prove too much for them? He wants to be a firefighter, eventually, but to serve some time as a paramedic first to stand a better chance of being accepted. Firefighter jobs are in huge demand round these parts, what with all the fires and all. To qualify for either job he requires to complete a "Basic EMT" course. This was his intent - take the course at the local CC along with enough supplemental credits to keep him covered by our health insurance meantime. But he forgot to Admit himself to the college, until - reminded by me and driven to the college at high speed - he managed to squeak in his application with, like, fifty minutes to go before the deadline. That was a Friday. The following Monday, barely three days hence, he forgot to register for his courses. By the time he remembered, Tuesday - rather, by the time I reminded him Tuesday - the EMT courses he needed were fully booked with no spare places. "Never mind," said we, "Turn-up anyway first day of class and ask to be admitted. The lecturers will dump anyone that doesn't turn-up first day and open the places to those who do." Yay. Except, of course, the stupid arse forgot the first day of school too and did not turn-up for any of his classes. We went spare that night - it really looked like his entire future was going to read "Save-On", and he had to wait two full days until his next scheduled classes to discover whether or not he still had a place at any of them. Bastard got soooo lucky. Future firefighter, paramedic? I can just imagine a scene of devastation and carnage, and there's Our Boy: <shrug>"Oops!"</shrug>

By Gawd, did we need to get away. Now - a little backstory to our trip to Vegas: seven years ago, still in Scotland, Visa approved but not yet in hand, I sold my Beamer back to the garage in Edinburgh I'd bought it from and wired the proceeds to my thentime-fiancée here in California. Wired pounds-to-dollars that she might use them to buy a van for our merging family that would be big enough to transport ourselves and our five kids and one or two visitors all at once. Traded the Beamer, bought a '95 Chevy Astro. Perfect - a great wee van, good mileage - waaay better than our pretentious all-wheel drive Jeep Grand Cherokee - modestly comfortable, holds us, the kids, the outlaws and half of Ikea all at once. Still have it today, clocked over 150,000 miles, and it runs pretty good. But the Air-Conditioning is goosed: which means it is absolutely no use for the drive through the desert to Vegas, not any more. So for the third time we rented a minivan, expecting a Qwest or a Dodge or some other small-but-comfortable contraption. Part of the fun of renting is driving something new, but you can't pick in advance. You may ask for a certain make or model, but what you get when you arrive at the rental desk is whatever turned-up at their car park that day. This time it was... an '05 Chevy Astro. Last of its kind, apparently.

And you know what? This spanking-new model of our old favorite van, it scored a mere Bleh on the travel. It's been tarted-up in the intervening years: the front seats are higher, little more leg room; the dash is a little sleeker; the rear seats definitely comfier for the girls this time round (the boys did not come with, remember?) but still - only a Bleh. The front seats have clearly suffered the influence of some Orthopaedic Expert or other because they're lumpier and not entirely comfortable. There are bits of chair poking into your lumbar and other uncomfortable regions. Me with my bad back and all, I need a decent seat in a car these days - but this van didn't have one. And it handles differently - doesn't turn as tightly, looks a lot wider from the driver seat and manouvres poorly. I like our ancient model better: but it got us there and back again, so I mustn't grumble. Couple of nights in Vegas, fully-comped because of my Winner Wife who racks-up an enormous number of points in a very short time, and wins enough for both of us to gamble the weekend and still come home with some tidy green to take to Fry's or wherever else. And so it was: we returned home last night, then it was straight to work, catching-up on events.

Back tae...

I have begun my new job - actually started in my new position last Monday. Same company, same building, same cubicle, same chair, same desktop. Different division. To transfer from one to another ought to be nothing, a mere shuffling of paper. You'd think, right?

Wrong.

The company I work for is built of acquisitions and mergers of diverse Tech companies. And though they all live under one umbrella, and though Mgt. strives to present an image of Unity and Union, All-One-Big-Family, reality is slightly lagging. A transfer from one division to another has entailed all of the steps one normally expects when changing jobs between different companies. I did not, however, have to resign as such, but I might just as well have? I had to sit through the company Orientation program again - though I've worked there four years; I've had to re-apply to all of the Benefit programs, including 401k (managed by the same third-party but with only half the Employer contributions this time); and my pay schedule has changed. Our two divisions, it seems, are not payed in the same weeks. Not complaining, not me... just sayin'.

Anyway: I have an awful lot of work to do in my new job - that part hasn't changed - so if you'll forgive me, I'd like to get back to it.

...I was so sure his name was Rumplestiltskin, but the baldy little bugger just laughed at me, bolting the door for another night.

Blinded By New Light

SCENE: 5am SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, a quiet suburban household:

[bang]...
BEARDED, FC:
urugh...
[B A N G ! ! ! !]
Uurruuurruuuugh!

So the Shuttle landed. Wasn't an earthquake. Well done.

An earthquake right now would not be welcome in this household, where four rooms of furniture and seven years family detritus are boxed and stacked in one as we wait the arrival of the kitchen fitter today and the tile fitter tomorrow. Not that the kitchen is being fitted yet - the mannie is coming to measure is all - but everything there has been ripped-out, gutted, and dumpstered. Gas pipes and electrical fittings are now to be moved in anticipation of new cabinets, new appliances, and a spanking new floor. Not that the kitchen will even be tiled tomorrow - we're tiling in two shifts. Dining room, Living room, bathroom and hallway will all be tiled first. Thursday, we hope. The kitchen and family room will be tiled sometime later, after the cabinets are up.

Meantime we pack ourselves uncomfortably into plastic chairs in the cement-floored family room, nestled amongst boxes and units and splint-legged puppies. Daughter chased him as he ran around the yard two weeks ago; he stopped, she did not. Splint-legged but not house-trained, puppy plop sheets littered here and there. Baloney prize when he hits a designated target zone. He clanks around on his splint like Long John Silver - keep a weather-eye out for a pee-faring pup with three legs, Ahaaar!

Madness and mayhem. It wasn't enough that we tore-up inside, Noooo, but we had to give the gardeners free reign outside too. Our house, our yard, was a jungle of greenery: trees, palms, yuccas growing everywhere front to back; a corner jungle of pomegranites, orange trees, bushes shrubs, more palms, more yuccas; and our own Green Monster hedge along the back. How high are power lines? The hedge was three feet shy of that, but ten feet thick and dead inside, ready to topple itself into the pool. A huge, humungous wall of green with blazing orange flowers that drew ten thousand humming birds late summer; a huge humungous wall of thorns, home to families of fearsome squirrels and musk-rats, super-squirrels who every now and then would flex their guns and send some thick flowered palm-type branch crashing to the ground. A huge humungous wall of green that hid us from our neighbors, and them from us. They visited, you know? Our neighbors over the back. They visited the other night, First Day of the chainsaws, first time we'd met in almost seven years. "Oh we do enjoy the privacy" quoth they, "such a shame to ruin it?" We agreed of course - we love the privacy of the hedge ourselves - but that still didn't mean the gardeners could cut it way up there. The best they could manage, safely at least, was to leave it eight feet tall. Or twenty feet short.. whatevs. Now I suspect our neighbors are pissed: I can see their upper story and their deck from where I'm sat, down here in my jumble-sale computer room. I bet they're mad as hornets now. I'm sorry. Nothing we could do. The pool guy, other hand, was cock-a-hoop on Saturday: he's been after us all year to cut the damned thing down, and though he could not clean the pool this week - it had a hedge in it, after all - still he came just to see. He'll be laughing other side of his face when we call him back though, and it's turned so black-green that he can't see the bottom any more. Better not hear one mumble of complaint, all I'm saying.

It's like a family trait, this doing everything-all-at-once. Followed me from earlier lives. Like the time we moved - my first wife, my first-born, and I - while she was heavily-pregnant with our second, now my eldest. We'd bought a fixer-upper that we'd tried to fix before we moved, but had to fix way more than ever we did bargain for. So when we moved, a full two weeks before the baby was due, we had no floors downstairs and half the walls were being rebuilt. Foundations had just been dug (the house had been built and stood for 150 years on the bare earth) and damp treatments injected; a sorely-disabled infant in one hand, a full-to-bursting wife on the other, and not even a phone line installed. Two days later, not two weeks, I had to run one mile at 6.45am to find a public phone to call an ambulance. Little bugger was born at 8.05 - that .05 being the officially-recorded second stage of labour.

Chaos and clutter, companions of old. How funny then, and not in a nice way, that amongst this endearing messy life I must build me tiny oases of order where everything, precisely placed, must always be just so? A sop to obsessive compulsion, call it, that drives my careless children mental. These summer vacation nights I am unable to sit at my own computers - my sacred space - because the crowd of kids are screaming to play WoW; World of Warcraft that I bought in a fit of goodness-knows-what weakness. They play twelve hours solid - 6pm to 6am - then wake us in the morning as they return, like Wampyres, to their light-shielded coffins. But - the bastards - despite all my shouting and pulling-out of hair - theirs and mine - still each morning my space has been eviscerated and destroyed and upset by those uncaring foot-clumping spawn of Beelzebub.

My yard is my subtle revenge upon them: for in clearing the woods and the trees and the shrubs and the hedges, my yard and my house are flooded with new sunlight, brighter than bright and hotter than... well, in this daily 105 degree bake I'll let you choose your own "whore's armpit" aphorism.

But now - please - I must get back to work. I've three days remaining in my current position, and two weeks hard coding to compress into that time. And the tile mannie is coming tomorrow to lay the floors and... and... and... You don't want to know. Really, you don't! So let me go for now, k?

LATER: Buggery bollox! It's not until Thursday that the floor guy cometh. Bugger. Not tomorrow at all. I don't know what feching day it is any more.

A Wee Wave

I KNOW I'M ALWAYS COMPLAINING how busy I am, and I know that's considered very bad form on a blog, but dammit, it's the truth. Fact is, lately, I've been too busy with other things even to write an "I'm too busy" complaint. I'm transitioning between jobs - moving internally from one division to another - and having to balance wrapping-up one set of work with reading-up on some completely different technology. So I'm swamped - but not just with work, also with home. We're in the midst of renovating, of upgrading the family pile to Bearded 2.0. We have no flooring, no carpets, no downstairs bathroom, very nearly no kitchen, and quite soon none of our old furniture. The house is currently swamped with all of the old stuff and a mountain of new. Second huge dumpster has just been delivered, this one to be filled with kitchen and bathroom fittings, residual carpet, and with old and irredeemable furniture and appliances. Probably the garden too, since we're digging-up all the trees and clearing-out the homesize forest they've become. Everything, it seems, must go.

Blogging, as they say, will be light in the continuing weeks, and I do apologise. You may console yourselves, ever so slightly, with the knowledge that being attentive to the needs of the Xenoverse is not the absolute last thing on my mind: my poor banjo has suffered far, far more neglect during the past month. I haven't lifted it once, not since I moved it upstairs to the bedroom to ensure it wouldn't be thrown away by a vengeful family.

I love my banjo, though I play it very poorly at novice level. I ought to devote at least half an hour each day to practise, but have never been able to do so for one reason or another. Drives the fambly crazy, practising rolls over and over; horrifying renditions of "Duelling Banjos" or "Jesse James" or "The Ballad of Jed Clampett". Teaching myself to play Scruggs-style rather than Clawhammer, all from a couple of music books and some tabs fetched from the internets. It's hard. Made more complicated still because - like Ziggy - I plays it left-hand, so all the instructions and the diagrams are upside-down and arse-over-tit. And yet despite that, despite my total lack of skill and tin ear, despite my short, chubby, clumsy Boss Hog fingers more suited to two-fingered typing than three-fingered picking, despite that I can't change chords without looking or in anything under five seconds; despite all that I love my banjo. There is no form of recreation that can compete with the learning and the playing of a musical instrument for sheer pleasure and enjoyment, or the feeling of wellness it inspires in the player. One day, perhaps, I may even play decently: but who cares? Not me.