Timmerov's Blog
risk
the most dangerous part in our travels to hawaii was the drive home from the airport on a saturday night. some idiot blew past us in moderately heavy traffic. changed lanes aggressively. then changed all 4 lanes out of sight. a few moments later every brake light in front of us lit up. the idiot had spun out and was perpendicular to traffic blocking the rightmost lanes. fortunately he didn't gun it just as we passed in front of him. a few more moments later and he's roaring up behind us again. he sure was in a big hurry to get to the next exit. i'm a big fan of darwinism. but he's just as likely to kill someone else as he is to kill himself.
home
we arrived home from hawaii to find a fat cat and a broken door. apparently the nice little old lady next door fed the cat a heaping bowl of food three times a day. usually she gets half a bowl once. the door was strange. apparently it was originally hung marginally. and apparently it shifted a couple of millimeters so now the latching bolt catches on the strike plate instead of securing itself. shimming the hinges would have been a pain. as would moving the strike plates for the latch and the dead bolt. and i certainly didn't want to shift the top of the house 3 mms more north of the bottom of the house. i fired up the dremel tool i got for christmas and took a few mms off the strike plate. works again. weird how i suddenly have uses for a tool i never new i needed.
arms and wings
on our flight home i was stretching my legs and waiting for garrett to finish in the potty in the tail section. a woman hiked up her shirt and showed a flight attendant a tag that was driving her crazy. i guess she asked for a clippers or scissors or something to cut it off. the attendent said 9/11 took those things away. i thought about helping her. but i chose not to reveal that i had smuggled a weapon onto a commercial airline. yes that's right. i refuse to let some bureaucrat who flies exclusively in private jets make stupid decisions about my safety. there's no way i want to die on an airplane taken over by armed and suicidal criminals where 50 some people would have fought for their lives and country if only they had the simplest of weapons. like a finger nail scissors.
japaiian
ever notice similarities between the hawaiian and japanese languages? it's almost as if they came from the same place. hmmm...
haleakala
haleakala means house of the sun. sun god. something. maui was a perverted hawaiian boy who wanted more time to play with his sister. uh huh. she gave him some of her hair. the picture books show braids. but i dunno. anywho he climbed the mountain and caught the sun. again the pictures show him using the braids as bonds. but again i dunno. it might have been bait. he wouldn't let the sun go until it promised to travel the sky more slowly. which made him and his sister very happy. not that there's anything wrong with that.
saturn
alisa and i spent an evening on the roof of the hyatt regency in kaanapali with an astronomer and his telescopes. no moon. it was way cool. we looked at stars, nebulas, more stars, planets. we listened to stories and really dumb jokes. straight overhead was saturn. it looked fake. i mean completely. it was like someone printed a bright white planet with rings around it on a black background. the astronomer didn't tell us what we'd be looking at. the game was to figure it out. he guaranteed we'd "guess" correctly. i didn't need to look to know what we'd be looking at.
boogie board
garrett was king of the boogie boards. he'd wade out into the ocean. time a wave perfectly. jump on his board and ride it all the way up the beach high and dry. that's my boy.
crash
the boys liked to go to d.t. fleming beach. it was the first beach we went to and they loved it so much they didn't want to go anywhere else. finally, the adults said we're going somewhere else. on the way to somewhere else we caught a rain shower. it caught a nice boy on a bicycle too. he flagged us down between two blind corners and asked if he could use our cell phone to call his mom and tell her he crashed, was okay, and would be arriving somewhat later than she was expecting. alisa patched him up under the car's back hatch with a wet one and a dora bandaid while he reassured his mom everything was okay. we sent him off and found our nice secluded coral and shell covered beach. right about then the rain stopped. karma good.
whales
the beautiful and talented alisa and myself would get up early and go for a walk on the nearby beach. some mornings we'd see whales out there playing. usually way off in the distance. the first sign would be water spouts. like thar she blows. then if you watched you might see one breach. then a tremendous splash. usually if there was one there would be many. it was pretty cool.
phone couples
we saw many of these. young couples looking like they might be on their honeymoons sitting by the beach talking on their cell phones. both of them. probably not to each other. it's frikken gorgeous out. the sand is fine. the water's warm. the whales are breaching. and they're in la la land chatting to whom? their mommies? work? their girlfriends?
backpack
i handed ben my backpack for a moment so i could do something. he put it on. i finished and he gave it back. i put it on. later i tried to take it off. i slipped off first one shoulder. then the other. and got completely stuck. he had shortened the straps enough that my arms were firmly pinned behind my back by the stupid heavy thing. i'm not as flexible as i used to be so i could not reach the adjusters to free myself. i'm looking at him like, you gonna help me or what? 'or what' in this case meaning stand there uselessly with the giggles.
addictions
at the airport we saw a man running across the street to flee the breathing zone around the doors. he had a cigarette in one hand and a lighter in the other. i remarked, boy it must suck to be that addicted to something. for some reason this gave alisa the giggles. i swear i have no idea why.
condo
the master bedroom of the condo we stayed in overlooked the living room. one day i was upstairs getting ready to go to the beach. ben was more/less directly below me playing cards. alisa called out, ben where's your hat. it was at my feet. so i picked it up and dropped it over the edge and straight onto ben's head with a bit of a wump. he kept right on playing.
sub
we took a ride in a submarine to a coral reef. that was pretty neat. i'd never been in a submarine before. it wasn't yellow. it was a lot like being in an aquarium. except you didn't have to walk around to change the view. we went down about 30 meters. at that depth most of the red light from the sun has been filtered out. it was fun being at the bottom of a red free sea.
suit
the first time the beautiful and talented alisa dragged me to hawaii i didn't own a swimming suit. so we bought me one. it was bright yellow. i was 27 at the time and still wrestling competitively. judging by the pictures of the trip i was probably in the best condition of my life. for some unknown reason this year i decided to take that suit along as my only swimwear. i didn't even try it on first. it still fit. but it was kinda tight. it was still yellow. but i don't remember it being quite so uh thin some 15 years ago. the built in jockey parts were shredding. so i felt like i was body surfing with a wedgie. anywho, i retired them unceremoniously in a trash can of the condo at the end of the week. it was kinda sad.
av gas
if someone passes gas on an airplane and the person next to them goes completely bonkers gasping for air and fanning themselves then the gas passer should have the option to smack the drama queeen silly. i think i'm going to include a whoopee cushion as part of my standard carryon gear. then when the hysterics end i can ask if they're quite done yet. pull out the cushion. and give it a squeeze. then maybe i'll show them my cell phone and ask them if they want to watch themselves make an ass of themselves before a video of it appears on youtube.
hawaii 2
we're home! yay! the cat missed us. a grand time was had by all. i had the most fun. i know i did because of all the new blog material i acquired. muhahahahahahah!
hawaii
we leave for hawaii today. back in a week. y'all have a good spring break too. ya hear?
help
another rainy day in middle school i was waiting for the bus on the bleachers in the gym and dicking around. they were the old fashioned wooden pull out kind. somehow i had managed to slip between the seats and the floorboards. instead of falling to the floor my fat head got stuck. kinda crookedly. my weight was pressing on my neck cutting off the blood to my brain. i held a pull up. but i couldn't find anything to push on with my feet. i was in trouble. my friends could see me. and hear me. but didn't grasp the seriousness of the situation. or they thought it was funny. just as i'm starting to panic i feel strong arms around my legs lifting me out of danger. it was bill, the funny looking special education student, who had more sense than anyone else.
speds
one day in middle school there was a kid getting harassed by a group of boys being boys. they asked him if he was retarded. he was skinny and kinda bug eyed and he didn't take the regular classes with the rest of us. he replied: not any more. i thought about that remarkable answer for a bit. then i asked him if i understood him correctly. he started life behind everyone else. worked his ass off. and now he's caught up. and somehow they think that makes them better than you. fuck em. his name was bill.
zero growth
i was thinking the other day about what it would take to achieve zero population growth worldwide. lessee... 6 billion people growing at 1.5% per year. give or take. works out to some 300,000 more people per day. shit. that's a big number. imagine trying to prevent 300,000 pregnancies every day. i think that works out to getting some 1-2 million couplers to use condoms. big task. on the other hand, we could let nature up the death rate. the sri lankan tsunami killed some quarter million people. imagine a disaster like that every single day. that's with the population of the world today. some folks estimate nature won't start kicking people's buckets until we double or quadruple our population. an extra million deaths a day.
truthiness
when people are too stubborn or too stupid to do the right thing for the wrong reason it's perfectly acceptable to get them to do the right thing for the wrong reason. now before you get your panties all in a bunch and flame me... make a list of all the right things you do for the wrong reasons. here let me get you started. you drive under the speed limit because you don't want to get a ticket. you pay taxes because you don't want to be arrested. you vote because your wife nags you. you quit smoking because it made your furniture stink. you brush your teeth because you want them white. you go to church, pray, and tithe because your mommy told you god wants you to. add to this list all the wrong reasons you use to get your kids to do the right thing. eat your vegetables so you get a treat. bring home good report cards so you can play video games. be nice to your brother or get a spanking. list still empty? congratulations. you're an outlier. with emphasis on "liar".
population 2
april fool's. but really. we need to get our population under control. two ways to do that. lower the birth rate. or increase the death rate. we need to do the first voluntarily. or mother nature will take care of the second.
population
one day i was ranting about the world being crushed by the sheer mass of humanity. the target of said rant suggested i set the good example and sterilize myself and my family. but we'll still be consuming resources that could be used by other people. as long as we're alive. he's right. if i really cared about the planet. that's what i should do. okay. today's friday. probably someone will miss us at little league opening day tomorrow. and school and work on monday. probably no one will actually check on us until aunt julie comes for dance class on thursday. that is of course. unless the mail carrier notices the smell.
