evilwayne

I don’t know.

That fell off the one of the cats yesterday.

Yeah, that’s it and she’s big. No, check that, she’s fucking huge. In all the years we’ve had Nala, she had occasionally brought in a tick that we’d find crawling around. Honestly, I think I’ve found 3 in the 11 years we’ve had her. But the kittens… Well, one is short-haired, like Nala. Which is part of the equation, I think. Rockie has none so far. But Jayne, he’s a long-haired fur ball. And he’s a moose on top of it. Extremely easy just about anything to lock on to; leaves, grass, ants, ticks, boats, planes, the Chrysler Building; you get the picture.

A few days ago, we found one tick on him. Then another. This thing prompted a more thorough check and sweet zombie Jesus did we hit the motherload. Hidden by his long, dark fur, I removed no less than a baker’s dozen of ticks (there’s a tasty image), both major kinds deer and dog. They must have been ringing the dinner bell for days. All were in various stages of engorgement, which is what they do. They suck the blood until they can suck no more and then drop off for a place to nest for the winter before birthing their vile brood of disgusting parasitic bringers of disease.

When we initially saw this thing in the hallway, I actually mistook it for a kind of jewelry bead (it is kind of shiny) or a seed of something. But I moved it a pencil and thought I saw a leg. The creep sets in and it’s off to find something to pick it up with and bring to brighter light for a closer look. So yeah, it’s pretty awful. We treated the cats, but I still expect to find more. They’re so damn hard to see and they can only be felt once they’ve feed for a bit.

Blech.

I was with a group of people in the desert–or, more probably, a wasteland. It was dark, but not night; dusk probably. There was a terrible sandstorm that obscured most of the surroundings. The sky was reddish between the clouds of dust.

The people I was with seemed to be a group of unrelated persons. I do remember that at one point it seemed like the president was there, but it wasn’t a specifically real person. Just a guy and that’s who he was.

We were lost, but there was this horrible sense of terror. That we were fleeing something and that time was ticking away.

In the distance, I started to make out the outline of a city. But it was futuristic in a very 1950′s sense. There were towers shaped like the Space Needle in Portland. Bubble-like buildings with large, flat rings. They were only outlines, the sandstorm reducing them to dark maroon shadows.

The sky itself began to clear, even if the sand was still being blown around on the ground. It was rapidly turning night and I could start to see stars.

Someone shouted something to the effect that time was up and pointed to the sky with a “LOOK!”

Up in the sky, there were shooting stars. Thousands of brilliant, burning streaks. Some would break up, explode and send streaks in all directions. There were so many of them and I can’t recall if someone said it, or I just knew it, but they were the start of an colossal meteor shower that was the announcement of a gigantic, killer asteroid. The meteors started getting more intense and the shadow city in the distance was struck many times. The spires crumbling down and collapsing as they pummeled the buildings.

We started running and I was following the person in front of me because it was the only thing I could see. Soon we came to an large outcropping of red rocks. It was the base of a large mountain of rocks and that led to a kind of hidden canyon.

There, the sandstorm was shutout. The group was smaller now, there were maybe four of us. It was dark, but there was a reddish haze over everything, like seeing through a filter. We made our way down the canyon and, nestled against the mountainside, almost hidden, was a factory.

It was enormous, and resembled a box with a smaller one on top and four or possibly six smokestack-like structures on top. They were tapered at their tips, so they looked a little like gigantic pipe-organs pipes.

We made our way down to the floor of the canyon and to the factory. Inside, it was clearly new, plastic was still on many of the things inside. But it was completely deserted. There was no sign that anyone had ever been there.

We wandered around and somewhere along the way, I was separated from everyone. I was alone in a large, warehouse section that housed multicolored ATV’s, all wrapped in clear plastic. There were roller lines for moving freight and large doors that I assumed went outside, I could see the fresh oil on the chains that opened the doors. Yellow paint on the floor indicated where forklifts would move cargo throughout the facility. All new, shiny and empty.

I made my way through some smaller warehouse rooms, filled with steel shelving and racks that were full of boxes. Inside one smaller room, there was a roller line that fed into a Plexiglas chamber against the wall. It continued on through to another room, but a heavy curtain, resembling the squeegee curtain at the end of a car wash blocked the
view.

Above the Plexiglas was a red button and a sign that I could actually read: Astronauts Only.

I knew there was a vacuum beyond the curtain and the chamber itself was a kind of airlock. This was hugely important for some reason. I looked frantically for a spacesuit or a sealed helmet and air supply. But there was nothing.

I left the room and started calling for the others, but they did not respond. I started running down corridors yelling and getting more and more certain that I was all alone now, but I needed to find them and tell them about the room.

This is about where I woke up.

One of the issues with letting all this go has been the zero-update-problem (or ZUP, which is only a shade worse than the intermittent-update-problem [IUP] and less evil than the dreaded involuntary crisis update problem [I-CUP] which was pretty much my 2007-2008 Year of Hell, but I digress…).

Anyhoo, one of the things Tine and I did late this past Spring was to start a garden. It was something I had wanted to do last year, but couldn’t get out of my own damn way at the time to get it off the ground. Even the arrival of Jenn’s funky seeds wasn’t powerful enough to make it happen. But this year, Tine was on board and, truthfully, the biggest reason it saw the light of day at all.

It’s not that big really. Probably 6′ x 8′ if we’re lucky, but Tine bought some tomato and cucumber seedlings and it was off to a good start. We planted some of the seeds Jen gave us, carrots and beans. Despite their touted ease of growth, about the only thing that didn’t come up were the beans.

This is the very first thing we harvested:

Turns out Tine bought a lot of plants. A real lot. There were so many cucumbers … well, actually, I don’t have an analogy for that one. It looked like a dildo manufacturing plant? No, that crude. And I should have saved it for the zucchinis, because those things were monstrous. I should have taken more photos of them.

And now the tomatoes are ripening. There are way to many damn tomatoes now.
This is what we got tonight:

There’s at least this many more out there. The cukes are done, I think. Most of the ones left are small and gherkinish (or white and yellow and malformed like mutant vegetables that are probably, as we speak, plotting a way to leap over the fence and partake of the tastey man-flesh just scant feet from their front door…)

This weekend we’ll take up the carrots, I think. Right now, there’s six stalks of various sizes, but a couple are of them are poking through. I have no idea what kinds of carrots got planted either, so it’ll be a surprise.

I’m not really a fan of carrots, but it doesn’t matter. I’m just happy it didn’t all up and die on the second week. We’re totally doing this again next year. The plan, right now, is to be more prepared for one. We’re hoping to map out what we want to plant and where (the tomato plants are too close to each other–hell, everything is too close to really walk around easily). We’re also going to expand it, I think. Take up a lot more room than this year.

While I’m sure I’ve let this site languish long enough to be forgotten by most, I have finally manged to get around to updating it. Blogger.com did away with ftp publishing, which was the only reason I was there in the first place. At the time, it was the easiest way to create a blog and export it to this site. But it apparently became too expensive to maintain for Google–probably because they needed all the money to take over the Internet and what all.

They terminated it sometime around May. They did attempt to work with ftp users and created some kind of migration tool that would have allowed any blog to continue. But, for some reason I still don’t understand, they weren’t allowing users to migrate to a root domain. I mean, it’s probably something simple that I don’t get, you know, like nuclear fusion. But the result is the same, I would have had to redirect the front page and that’s just too much work for me. I mean, there’s probably two or three buttons I’d have to push… come on.

So, I haphazardly… or is it lazily? Yeah,  it’s that one, I lazily figured I’d do something in the near future with this site and here it is. After looking around for some blogging software, I figured I’d give WordPress a shot. The hosting service offers it as an easy install, they have a bunch of templates (so the front page may go through an identity crisis over the next short while) and it’s has been extremely easy to work with; so far, everything I want is somewhere within the admin options. Some things I used to have to access through an FTP client. So, neat!

Right now, there’s not a lot here. I should be able to access all the old, Blogger archives (they’re resident on my site anyway) so none of my past rantings are lost (is that a good thing?). And the other pages need to be updated as well.

All of which will surely happen at my normal, lightning speed pace.