Can’t Sleep. Clown Will Eat Me.

Or, to keep the references to The Simpsons going, “Worst.  Vacation.  Ever.”

As I start to write this it’s just a bit before 5:30 AM.
I tried going to bed a few hours ago, but, well, here I am writing this.
I normally take a significant amount of time off from work for the holidays.  At a minimum, I take off the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, though I usually take Christmas Eve off as well.
This time around I took the full two weeks off.
I didn’t expect that I would do anything fun or exciting, or even anything productive, really (thought I had intended to try to do some work on the whole comic book thing), but I also didn’t expect to spend most of the time being sick.  And yet that’s exactly what I did.
I caught a doozy of a cold that at times made it seem as though I would soon become an entirely mucus-based lifeform.
Even after I finally began to recover and return to the state that I bitterly refer to as “normal,” I was still a bit out of it and found myself sleeping away my rapidly-dwindling vacation time.
This completely irregular sleep schedule – as opposed to my normal mostly irregular sleep schedule – has thrown everything completely off-kilter.
Which is part of why I’m up writing this.
In addition to my sleep schedule being wonky, my eyes have been wonkier than usual.
When I first started developing the symptoms of the cold, my Gentle Molding lenses started to bother me.  Given that wearing them while sick can lead to bad things happening – namely eye infections – and that I didn’t really have anywhere to go, what with being a leaky, disgusting abomination, I didn’t bother wearing them while I was sick.
This was problematic, as my vision rapidly deteriorates when I don’t wear them.  One night without them isn’t a big deal – my typical schedule is to not wear them one night a week – as my eyes hold their shape well enough for me to function normally.  After two nights without them, though, functioning becomes a bit more difficult, and after that everything that’s more than five feet in front of me becomes an indistinct blur.
So that means that I have to resort to wearing my glasses.
However, there’s a problem with that.
I can’t actually wear them and get any benefit from doing so until after about three days of not wearing my lenses, but even so, no matter how long I go without wearing my lenses, my vision never reverts back to being as bad as it was when I regularly wore my glasses.
So wearing them leads to headaches and nausea.  And even if it weren’t for that, I couldn’t just wear them all the time like I used to, because back when I wore them regularly that whole “five feet in front of me” thing was too far to see without them.
So if I want to be able to see something that’s not five feet and one inch away from me and have it not be a blur when I’m in that state, I have to take them off.
That gets old real quick.
After finally recovering enough from the cold I thought it was safe to wear my lenses again.
That worked about as well as pouring sulphuric acid directly into my eyes.
So, okay, I wasn’t sufficiently recovered.
I gave it a couple more days.  Same thing.
Then I thought, “Hmm, sometimes this happens when I get the lenses mixed up and wear the right lens in my left eye and vice versa,” so, because I can never remember which is which (the lenses are only distinguishable from each other by the size of the dots on them), I decided to try swapping them.
It had been my right eye that was bothering me primarily when I wore the lenses.  What I found upon switching them was that my left eye started bothering me, while my right eye was mostly okay.
(Based on how my vision turned out, though, it was clear that I had been correctly matching the lenses with their corresponding eyes before doing the swap.)
So I thought that maybe there was just something wrong with that lens.  Maybe it somehow got warped or something.
I still have my old pair of lenses, so I cleaned the right one, put it in, and success!  My right eye wasn’t bothering me at all.  But then my left eye – which had the newer lens in – started to really bother me.  Okay, so both lenses are jacked up somehow.
At that point, it was 4 AM and I didn’t feel like bothering with cleaning the old left lens, so I just took the left one out and slept with the old right lens in.
So when I got up yesterday, I could see again (even though my vision was corrected in only one eye…that’s kind of how my eyes work, or don’t work, I guess.  I don’t know.).
I didn’t feel like bothering with going to the eye doctor to find out what was up with my lenses, figuring I could deal with that some other day and just wear my old lenses for the time being.
So, before going to bed a few hours ago, I cleaned both lenses, popped them in and found that my fucking right eye was killing me again.
Not as bad as with the new lens, but even so.
It doesn’t seem to be an infection, as my eyes feel fine when I don’t have the lenses in (though they remain irritated for a while after I take them out), and I don’t have the problems I had in the past when my eyes were infected, so I don’t know what’s up with that..
What I do know is that the lingering irritation even after I took it out contributed to keeping me awake and finally forcing me to admit defeat and get out of bed.
The other thing I know is that these past two weeks have sucked ass.

Family Ties

I don’t think it comes as a surprise to anyone that I don’t hold any particularly strong affection for the place of my birth.
After all, there’s a reason – a lot of them, actually – that I no longer live in the UP.
If I didn’t have family there, I can’t think of a single reason why I would ever go back.  Certainly I’d never be driven by any sense of nostalgia or some kind of quest to reconnect with my youth or whatever, though that has more to do with the kind of person I am – one who’s not typically motivated by those kinds of things – and not so much with the place itself.
It’s not that I hate it there, or that I don’t have any good memories of my life there, but…it’s just a place.  A place I happened to live in for the majority of my life.
(For the record, it’s not like Northern Virginia is all that great either, though it certainly has some things going for it that, on balance, make it more appealing than the UP.)
In the times I’ve visited over the years several people have asked me when I’m moving back, as though doing so is a foregone conclusion.  “'’Never’ seems like a good time,” I typically say, finding myself greeted with a horrified look of shock and dismay, as this is taken as a personal affront.
I’ve insulted their home, and by extension I’ve insulted them, because they feel personally invested in the place in exactly the way that I don’t.  I understand that reaction intellectually, but I don’t really understand it on an emotional level.  A place is a place, and, for the most part, it’s only as good as what you make it, but some places give you a little more to work with than others.  The UP just doesn’t give me the raw materials I need to work with in order to make it a good place for me, and I’m never going to share that chauvinistic belief that there is something about the area that makes it inherently superior to others.  Does it have things going for it?  Of course.  It’s a beautiful area – when it’s not buried under snow – and I like how it stays light so much longer there on summer evenings, and in contrast to NoVA, the lack of traffic is almost heavenly.
But, as I’ve said many times before, while I call it “home,” it hasn’t been my home for a very long time, and honestly, it never really felt like it was.
So that’s my little preamble, and now I’ll talk about the few days I recently spent in my kinda-sorta home.
As I said, it’s really only family that brings me back to the UP, and in this case it was a new member of my family.  My niece Jourdan recently became a mother, and so it came to pass that she and her husband Andy made the voyage north from Arkansas to visit the family, which is what drew the rest of us in, as we were all eager to meet this new addition.
I’ve already written about my experience getting there, so let’s get to the details of my first day back in the UP.
After sleeping on a too-short couch – I managed to sleep only because I was so exhausted – it was time to begin the day, which involved having breakfast with my mom and my brother Brad.  (I do miss my mom’s French Toast, but it’s not something I can eat very often given the restrictions of my diet).  Later in the day, we headed out to Walmart for my brother to pick up a few things and for me to buy a wireless router for my mom so that she could make use of the new Windows RT tablet I bought for her.
Later that afternoon, my sister Kim arrived with Jourdan and the baby – Chole – so that my mom could take her “trick-or-treating” around the building to show off her great-granddaughter to all of her friends.
While displaying her to one particularly enraptured neighbor, my mom attempted to introduce my brother and I.  I said, “She doesn’t care; she’s got a baby to look at.”
And I can’t fault her at all – Chole is much more interesting to look at that either myself or my brother.
Later that evening, with my mom and brother in tow, we headed out for dinner before making our way to the casino.  Unfortunately, while the food my brother and I had – we got the same thing – was excellent, my mom’s didn’t sit well with her so she decided that she should call it a night and my brother and I dropped her off at home and headed on to the casino.
While there, my luck managed to be about typical, which is to say it was terrible.  I’m not that big on going to the casino in the first place, but I’m even less inclined to do so now, as I only like (inasmuch as I like anything there) to play standard slots, and those have become increasingly rare, replaced with the convoluted electronic games in which you play a thousand lines at a time and some crazy shit happens and you have to scratch your head to figure out what that crazy shit actually means.
The few standard slots that remain are difficult to get to, as they’re generally spoken for, but eventually as the night wore on I was able to score a spot at one of the machines I like.  It turned out to be worth the wait, as I ended up cashing out $350.
On the way home we came within inches of hitting a bear.  So that was neat.
Sunday was the official family get-together at Hancock Beach, and my sister Kristy, her husband Ken, my brother Stuart and my nephew Todd, and a foster child Kristy and Ken have taken in – whom I just learned about the day before – arrived and we set to eating a lot of food and sitting around talking.
It was the first time that all of has been together since before my dad died.
When we first arrived at the beach, I spent some time talking to Andy and Jourdan before going into the pavilion to greet the others.  There was some odd little man I didn’t recognize sitting next to my sister, and, seeing the Monster Absolute Zero in my hand, without any sort of greeting he said to me, “Those are bad for you.”
Thinking, “Who the fuck are you?” I shrugged and said, “I do a lot of things that are bad for me.”
”I don’t drink pop at all,” he said, and it was clear that there was something….off about him.  “Just water.”
”Oh,” I said, as if this were somehow worth knowing.  “Okay.”
I looked to my sister in confusion, and she said, “A straggler.”  I had assumed that someone there – family included my brother-in-laws family and a friend of my sister’s and her daughter – knew him and had invited him, but he was, apparently, just a crasher who was at the beach and decided that he’d join in.  He went on to inform several other people about his new “water only” policy, but as the time came for us to actually start eating, my brother-in-law gave him the boot.
That evening we were all too tired and bloated to do much of anything.
On Monday my brother got a visitor, as someone he went to high school with lives in our mom’s building.  I’ll say that this was…entertaining and leave it at that.
That evening we headed over to Kim’s to visit and a friend of my mom’s stopped by to see the baby.
I was up early Tuesday morning to bring my brother to the airport.  I had originally intended to leave the same day, but clicked the wrong date when I booked my flight.  (I had wanted to avoid the worst of the 4th of July travel, but my previous post tells you how well that worked out.)
On Tuesday I bought a book to read on my flight back and my mom and I had lunch, and then I spent the evening visiting at Kim’s.  We had intended to see a movie that night, but the only thing I wanted to see was too late for Kim, and Dean ended up getting a migraine anyway.
And that more or less brings us up to date.
The highlight of the trip was, of course, getting to see Chloe, but it was nice to see everyone, and, again, it’s only the people that can get me to go back to the UP in the first place (and to put up with the travel nightmares that invariably plague me when I do so).
It’s still strange to think that my sister is a grandmother, but it’s clear that it’s a role she loves.
My niece Jenni is heading to Arkansas with her sister for the summer to help out with the baby while Jourdan goes back to work.  I slipped her a fifty from my winnings for her trip.
And now I’m back here, settling into my routine, and trying to find the raw materials to work with in order to make this place that is now my home into a good place.

My Punishment

Last night Scott and I attended a screening of RiffTrax LIVE featuring a riffing of the hilariously execrable Manos:  The Hands of Fate.
I knew I wouldn’t be getting home until well past my bedtime, so, as I can always use a day off anyway, I decided to schedule a vacation day for today.
As I invariably do, I made use of the time off from work to make a Costco run, either because it’s much more convenient and the place is less crowded if I go on a weekday morning, because I hate myself and feel like I need to be punished for taking the time off from work, or some combination of the two.
Even though the place is much less crowded in the morning, making it much less painful and annoying than going in the evening or – *Shudder* – on the weekend, I still hate going there, and I think that, more than the allure of slightly cheaper gadgets and bulk quantities of laxatives – or whatever the hell it is I spend so much money on when I go there – I still really, really dislike the place.
I guess that, in the absence of work, I have a need to go someplace where I don’t want to go.

****

To add to the First World Problem-style annoyance of “having” to go to Costco, before I left this morning I found that I had lost my membership card.
So when I got there, I had to go to the Member Services desk to get a new one.  I was fortunate in that there was no line, and the process didn’t take long, but it still added up to additional precious minutes of my life wasted at Costco, precious minutes that I could have been wasting somewhere else.
After giving me my shiny new card, the woman behind the counter asked me if I needed a coupon book, or if I already had one.
”No thanks,” I said, “there wasn’t anything in it that I need.”
”Wow, you’re lucky if there’s nothing in there you need!  Only a man could say that.”

****

While I was standing in the parking lot smoking a cigarette before getting in the car, a little old lady who barely spoke English approached me and asked for some assistance.
It took some time for me to understand what it was she was asking me to do, but eventually I pieced it together.
She needed to see what kind of car battery she had, but she didn’t know how to pop the hood on her car so that she could look.
I’m glad that’s all it was, as that pretty much exhausted my knowledge of auto mechanics.

****

On the way home after the movie last night I stopped at a grocery store to pick up some things for the morning.
Having paused near the entrance to smoke a cigarette, I noted the two teenaged employees who were having a conversation while one of them was replacing the bags in the trash and recycling bins.  I came in on the tail-end of a conversation that made me sad:
Teen 1:  Who’s Alfred Hitchcock?
Teen 2:  You know, Alfred Hitchcock.  He was a famous director.
Teen 1:  Never heard of him.
That there was someone who is, presumably, old enough to drive, yet did not know who Alfred Hitchcock was made me feel old and sad.  Still, at least one of them knew who he was.
And then:
Teen 2:  I think he did, like, Citizen Kane or something.
*Sigh*

Shortly before I finished my cigarette, a manager was making her way out of the store (having finished her shift, apparently), and she began chastising the one who was working (and he did remain busy throughout the whole conversation) for talking to the non-working one in front of – gasp! – customers.

Teen 2:  He’s clocked out.
Manager:  But you’re not.  How do you think it looks?
Teen 2:  Well, I didn’t want to say, “Dude, you can’t talk to me.”
Manager:  Maybe you should have.

I kind of wanted to say, “Look, lady; these kids have shitty jobs at your shitty store.  They’re not hurting anyone by having a conversation while getting work done.  I mean, it’s not neurosurgery; changing a trash bag doesn’t require extreme concentration.  I worked in a grocery store for years; it’s a shitty, boring job and you can’t fault young people for finding some way to pass the time.  If some customer is bothered by the fact that they’re talking to each other, who gives a shit?  I can tell you that the whole ‘the customer is always right’ thing is bullshit.  If you’re going to yell at them for anything, yell at them for not knowing who Alfred Hitchcock was.”
But, of course, I didn’t say that, or anything, but I kind of wish I had.

Checking The Checklist

As Thursday rolls into Friday, we approach what is the second-most hated point for me when it comes to having time off: my regular time off.

By the afternoon I'll be into what would, at most any other point in the year, be just a normal weekend. It's no longer a vacation once you're into your weekend as far as I'm concerned.

(It goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway: the most hated point for me when it comes to time off is when the time off ends completely.)

In any case, as I approached my time off, I had a mental checklist of things I wanted to accomplish. Let's see how I did:

Checked:

Get the car washed

Move the files from my various external hard drives to my new Home Server

Sit around doing nothing in particular

Unchecked:

Draw - or at least work on - one new picture every day

Do some work on the Heroic Portraits site

Do some work on an entirely new site*

Organize and archive my comics

Move the files from my various CDs and DVDs to my new Home Server

Quit smoking

Figure out what the hell it is I'm doing with my life and what the hell it is I want to do with my life

Partially Checked:

Get back into a regular workout routine

If you're not at all surprised by the fact that so few things were checked off, you should at least be surprised by the fact that anything other than "Sit around doing nothing in particular" was checked off.

*Are details forthcoming? Maybe. We'll see if I actually get around to doing any work on it.

That Was 20 Years Ago?

First of all, happy birthday to my nephew Jeremy, who's 20 today.
...
20.
Holy crap.
Last night I was lying in bed failing to fall asleep because I'd made the mistake of taking a nap during the day, and I had a particular performance of the song Circles by Joe Satriani playing in my head.



The version in my head was recorded live, and it starts out with him kind of dicking around on the guitar, doing some improvizational stuff built around the opening strains of the song and tossing in some bits from other songs. I kind of like the improv bit, and I also like the song, and I also like the uncertainty of the audience as he's up there playing something they've never heard before, which is then replaced by cheering when he actually starts playing the song and they recognize it.
So, lying there, I thought, "Why am I just listening to this in my head when my iPod is right there?"
So I put the song playing, and it got me to thinking about the album that the studio version of the song is on, and I realized that I bought that album - Surfing with the Alien - in 1989. Then I realized that 1989 was 20 years ago.
And now my nephew - born some months after I bought that album - is also 20.
*Sigh*
It had been my intention to mow the lawn yesterday, but as it was about a thousand degrees outside that didn't happen. Nor did it happen today, as it was a thousand and one degrees outside.
(I may be exaggerating a little, but damn it was hot.)
And beyond that not much else is going on. I'm being haunted by the ghosts of creative ideas past and trying - mostly in vain - to placate them, which mostly involves unproductive drawing.
Posts will be even fewer and farther between over the next week and a half or so, since, as mentioned, I'll be heading to Michigan later this week.
I'm sure you'll manage.

Travelong...Err, I Mean "Travelogue"

Okay, we’ve finally reached the moment that no one has been waiting for: the time to write a detailed entry about my trip home to Michigan.
I had been talking to someone at work about the UP and how small it is, and I threw out a guess as to the total population. Later, I checked out the Wikipedia entry and discovered that I had overestimated by about 20,000.
I further learned that while the UP comprises nearly one third of the total land mass of the state, it only contains about three percent of the total population.
Flying out of Dulles, the thought occurred to me that going back home is like taking a trip into the past using a defective time machine that actually deposits you in some alternate timeline in which things are mostly the same, but not quite how you remember them.
This is to say that while I’m away some things change, but for the most part things, and in particular people, stay the same.
In any case, after meeting up with Brad in Minneapolis, we made our way to Hancock via one of the standard “puddle jumper” prop planes.
The flight attendant was surprisingly cute, and as I sat in the aisle seat – airplane seating is the one place in the world where I feel like I’m a really big person – her hips kept bumping my arm and shoulder every time she went past. I can tell you that she was very firm and toned, though I’m sure she was black and blue by the end of the flight.
When we arrived at the airport it became clear that this was her first flight to the UP, as she made several references to the jetway.
Not in the UP, sister; we just take the stairs down and walk to the terminal in the open air. Said air being about thirty degrees cooler than the air in Virginia, and fifty degrees cooler than the air in Texas where my brother lives.
Brad had agreed to pay for the rental car, as there was no point in us both renting a car, and the site he booked it through said that the rental desk actually closes at 6 PM. He’d rescheduled the pick up for the next day, as we were arriving after 11 PM, and Jourdan had driven up, with my mom, to get us.
Turns out the travel site has erroneous information, and the rental desk was open, so Brad was able to get the car that night.
My mom rode back to her place with Brad, and I rode with Jourdan to keep her company. I found it kind of funny that she drives the same kind of car as Kathleen, so I was dropped off at one airport in a Kia Sportage, and picked up from another in a Kia Sportage.
After staying up and visiting for a few hours, we decided to crash, and I learned that my mom’s couch is not ideally suited for sleeping on (Brad got the spare bedroom). My mom offered to sleep on the couch and let me take her bed, but seriously, what kind of son would make his mom sleep on the couch? Well, I’m not sure of the answer to that, other than that it’s not the kind of son I am.
Friday morning my mom made breakfast, and after we all got ready we got in the car and stopped by to visit my sister Kim at work. Then we headed out to Winona so that my mom could put flowers on the Katajamaki family plot, where my grandparents, aunt, and uncle are buried. My dad, as you may recall, was cremated, and so is not buried there.
(I’ve probably mentioned this before, but Maki is only part of a traditional Finnish family name. There’s usually some descriptive prefix – Kataja, in the case of my family – that precedes it. A lot of Finns dropped the prefix upon arrival in America – and some went the extra mile, dropping the prefix and taking the English word for Maki, which is “Hill,” as their last name. Not so with my family, until my grandparents had kids and chose to name them simply Maki. This is why my paternal grandparents had a different last name from mine. There are all kinds of Makis in the UP, all of whom had in the past been some different kind of Maki, like, for example, Leppamaki, or Palomaki, or Rintamaki. The dropped prefix is why there are so many Makis around yet most of them aren’t actually related to each other. As an aside, at various times I’ve had people misunderstand me when I’ve said that my name is Jon-Paul Maki, thinking that I’d said my name was Jon Palomaki. And of course there’s the old joke: What do you call a Finnish prostitute? Rentamaki.)
We were going to have lunch at the hotel/restaurant in Twin Lakes, but decided to head to the Chinese buffet place in Houghton, where I received the following fortune: A short stranger will soon enter your life with blessings to share.
Given my predilection for petite women, this works really well with the whole “in bed” thing.
We also stopped by the cemetery where my mom’s parents are buried so she could put flowers there (after we managed to remember where their graves are).
Later in the afternoon we went over to Kim’s house to visit for a while, and then the lot of us went out to have dinner at Pizza Hut.
From there, my mom, Brad, and I went to the casino, where I won $40 pretty early on, but eventually ended up giving it all (and more) back.
On Saturday there was an open house for these “luxury condos” that had been built right next to the bridge on the Hancock side. And I mean, right next to it.
We’d decided to check them out just to see what they were like. For what they were asking, the condos were not impressive, having virtually nothing in the way of high-end features, and no amenities apart from a heated parking garage. Apparently the developers expect people to pay all of that money for the view, which is impressive…if you like watching cars going by constantly.
We had a late lunch at the Kaleva Café, a place that derives its name from the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic. Most people pronounce it Ka-LEE-vuh, though it would more properly be pronounced “KULL-uh-VUH.”
The thing about small town restaurants is the service is always great. The wait staff is always friendly, cheerful, and solicitous.
Except, you know, when they aren’t, which was the case at the Kaleva. The waitress – eventually – came to our table, plopped the menus down, stared at us in silence until we gave her our drink orders, then stomped off. She didn’t get any friendlier from there.
However, and this ties in with my aside about my last name, the one bright spot was seeing this on the menu:



I, of course, couldn’t not order it.
It was essentially just a Big Mac knock-off (apparently there’s also a breakfast sandwich called the Egg McMaki), and wasn’t too bad, though it was pretty messy. Somehow that seems appropriate.
In the afternoon we went to a graduation party for some relative that I don’t know, which was as exciting as it sounds.
That evening, after eating at KFC, we headed to the casino again.
At KFC we used some coupons, and mine said that I could get potato wedges or any individual side. When I asked for cole slaw, the girl said, “Unless it says otherwise you have to get the potato wedges.” I pointed out the “individual sides” thing and said, jokingly, “Don’t argue with me! I’ve done my homework.”
At the casino I lost early and lost often, until I was down to my last $20, at which point I won about $100, which brought me somewhere past the break even point.
Normally I stick to your standard quarter slots, eschewing table games (too many people to deal with), and those fancy penny, two penny, and nickel machines with all of their wackiness and confusing forty-five line games and bonuses and whatnot, though given the popularity of the wacky games it can be difficult to find straightforward slots.
Some of the slots, I learned the hard way, allow you to choose how much a credit is worth, and generally default to $1. I went through several turns on one, playing three credits at a time and assuming that I was only playing seventy-five cents at a pop, before realizing that I was giving it $3 each time.
Brad likes to play roulette, and after having watched him play both nights, I decided to give it a shot. I was actually doing pretty well, but by the time I started playing we were getting ready to leave. Still, I started out with $20 worth of chips and ended up walking away with $55. So not bad.
Sunday was the graduation party, and despite the forecast, we ended up having a pretty nice day. It was actually pretty hot, though sometime in the afternoon the sun went away and the wind kicked up and the temperature dropped at least ten degrees.
By that time the party had dwindled down to just family, though eventually a few other people showed up, and many of those assembled started playing drinking games. I never saw the appeal of drinking games, really. I mean, for me, the only game I needed to play when I drank was the one in which I grabbed a beer and drank it. I won every time.
Beer was running low by the time my mom got tired and I brought her home, so, being the only sober one besides Kim, and venturing out into the world anyway, I was elected beer bitch. I stopped at a Citgo on the way to my mom’s place, but it was closed. The only other place that sold beer that was still opened was the Wal-Mart Super Center, so I headed there after dropping my mom off.
I was standing in line behind this young black guy whose shorts were hanging all the way down past his ass. I didn’t really think anything of it – or even notice, really – until this girl in another line said, “Excuse me. Your shorts are falling down.” He responded, a little annoyed, “I know. That’s how I want them,” though he did actually pull them up.
She said, “Oh,” and shook her head in disbelief, laughing with a sort of shocked bewilderment.
She and I were leaving the store at about the same time, so I said, to her, “Were you just being a smart ass with the shorts comment?”
Her response was that she’d “never seen anything like it,” and when I told her that it’s pretty common, she said, “Well, I guess I just wasn’t raised that way.”
I can pretty much guarantee that she was an Apostolic Lutheran – live around them long enough and you can tell just by looking at them, though when they’re with their families of 12+ children it becomes even easier to spot them – but even so, the fact that she was so dismayed by the baggy pants thing is just baffling. I mean, how sheltered a life do you have to live to have never seen that before? Even in the UP, dressing like that has been pretty common for at least fifteen years.
When I returned with the beer my sister Kristy commented upon discovering that I had the foresight to buy cold beer that at least I remembered that much about drinking.
Kim works for a Pepsi distributor, so she’d set up a portable soda fountain outside for the party. Venturing out to get myself some Sierra Mist, one of Jeremy’s friends, who’d arrived in my absence said, “There better be Jack Daniels in there.”
Deciding against a more appropriate response of “Blow me,” I simply said “Nope.”
At this point, Jeremy said, “This is my Uncle Jon, by the way.”
Eventually, wanting to avoid lengthy, beery farewells, Brad and I managed to sneak out sometime around 1 AM.
Monday morning the coldness that had moved in Sunday evening decided to stick around.
Brad and I went to Perkins for breakfast. The place was packed, as it was apparently the only restaurant open, a fact which, when scheduling staff for the day, management hadn’t counted on, so they were seriously understaffed, and the whole process took longer than it ought to have.
When we got back to my mom’s place we spotted our brother-in-law Ken loading up a chair that my mom was giving to him and Kristy – my mom didn’t come to breakfast because she was waiting for Kristy, Ken, and Todd, who’d spent the night at Kim’s, to stop by – and I noticed that it was actually snowing.
Nothing stuck, but there were definitely flakes falling.
That afternoon we went to see the latest Indiana Jones movie, which was entertaining (you can read Scott’s review if you haven’t seen it and are interested), and after eating dinner at my mom’s we went over to Kim’s to visit for a while and say our goodbyes.
That evening my mom’s friend Kathy stopped by and visited for a while, and, eventually, as I had to get up early in the morning, it was time to turn in.
And that was pretty much my trip. I’ve already given you the gory details of my long and horrifically boring return to Virginia, so that pretty much covers it.
Of my family, Brad and I are the only ones who live outside of the UP, so at various times throughout our stay there we each had to field the question, from assorted people, of when we plan to move back.
We both responded with some variation of “Well, ‘never’ has a pretty nice ring to it.”
After all, both of us left for a reason, not the least of which is that the fact that it snowed on freakin’ Memorial Day is not exactly an uncommon occurrence and is barely noteworthy.
I’m the first to admit that it’s a beautiful area – at least for a couple months out of the year, though sometimes, on a really good day, even the snow and cold can have a sort of harsh appeal – but there’s just nothing there.
There are so many people who sing the praises of small town life, elevating it to near-heavenly status, but I’m of the opinion that the people who do so either never actually lived in a small town, have their memories too clouded by nostalgia to remember what it was actually like, or had life experiences so vastly different from mine that there is simply no way in which we can find common ground.
Going to the mall, for example, was like seeing the opening scenes of some documentary about the devastating effects that a plant closure has had on a community, and it’s always like that, and has always been like that. It’s bleak and it’s depressing and there’s just no vitality to the area, and I could not, for the life of me, find a reason to stay.
I don’t mean to fault the people who do stay – though I’m at a loss to understand the people who leave and return – and I’m not looking down my nose at the place or the people (well, maybe I’m looking down my nose at some of the people), but I did my time there. It’s done, and the whole place is pretty much the quintessence of the expression “It’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.” More to the point, I didn’t want to live there.
So, yeah. That’s a big “no” on moving back.
But I do love my family, and I miss them, so the annual visits home will continue to be a tradition for a long time to come.
This particular visit seemed extremely short, though, especially with the late arrival and early departure eating up a fair amount of the available time. So the next trip will require better planning and time management.
But anyway, there you have it. I went, I saw, I left. It’s not exactly veni, vidi, vici, but then I’m not exactly Caesar.

That Explains That Part Anyway

Normally when I fly home the route is Dulles to Minneapolis to Hancock, though sometimes Detroit figures into the route as well.
This time, however, it’s Dulles to Indianapolis to Minneapolis to Hancock.
I’ve been kind of baffled by that, but when I went online to check in, I found the reason.
In the standard scenario, I fly out on Northwest. This time, for some reason, I’m flying out on United, then getting on Northwest for the remaining leg of my journey.
So that explains the unusual route, though that still leaves me wondering why I’m flying out on United in the first place.
Oh well.
The trip is pretty much guaranteed to suck, as it’s going to take over 11 hours, with 5 of those hours stuck in the Indianapolis airport.
Again, oh well.
When I worked at AOL, with my 3 day work week, taking a “week” off meant having 11 days off total.
With the 5 day work week, not so much.
In any case, having that much time off meant that it was always easy to plan a trip home and back and leave myself a buffer of at least a day between getting home and having to go back to work.
This meant that I wasn’t accustomed to having to actually think that much about scheduling, which is why I ended up scheduling myself to get home Tuesday evening and then go to work Wednesday morning.
Oops.
Fortunately, I talked to my boss who was nice enough to allow me to add Wednesday onto my time off.
So that’s cool.
And that’s pretty much all that’s going on. I may or may not post some entries while I’m away.