Blog Hard

Oh yeah, that’s right! I have a blog. It’s like I completely forgot about it for five months. I think my last entry involved a family trip to Giant Burger right after Thanksgiving. Good God, that’s gotta be the biggest gap since I started this thing. I hope my loyal fans (all 3 of you, possibly 4) aren’t too upset. I tend to procrastinate, which has been well documented, so this shouldn’t be a huge surprise. In fact, in a previous blog that I (barely) maintained several years back, I had this to say about it:

I'm such a lazy fuck. I go to all the trouble of creating my very own personal self-serving blog, and then I can't summon the energy to post a goddamn update once in a while. No entries for two whole months. Jesus. Um... let's see. Well, I FINALLY hooked up my rear speakers today, so my surround sound system is at last complete. It only took me nine fucking months to get around to it. I'm the Dali Fucking Lama when it comes to procrastination. Antisocial narcoleptics and couch potatoes probably pray to me at night, but sadly their prayers fall on deaf ears. I'm too busy seeing how far up my ass my head can reach.

Score? Self-loathing 1, self-love zero. As I approach the big 4-0, I’m amused (and a bit disturbed) that I’ve lost none of my edge when it comes to dissing myself.

Speaking of procrastination, I have only to gaze out my back door (I mean the back door of my house, not my… oh, never mind) to see a shining (glaring?) example of my habitual inaction: my convertible, which died a dramatic and tragic death last August, is still sitting at the edge of my property, lying quietly dormant beneath a layer of dust and pollen. I finally put an ad on Craigslist last weekend. That’s right, it only took NINE FUCKING MONTHS for me to finally spend the five minutes it took to place the ad (which includes upload times for the photos and the three times I had to edit it due to spelling errors). In fact, I’ve got a guy coming over after work to look at it. Two people have flaked on me so far, so my fingers are crossed (which makes typing kinda difficult).

In any case --- I guess I need to do some catch-up here. The five month gap in my life story needs filling.

Let’s see (looking through my folder full o’ blog entries)… Well well well, what a surprise. Turns out I did write a few entries in December and one in January, but never got around to actually publishing them. So I’ll get those uploaded ASAP (update: already done. For continuity’s sake, it made sense to go ahead and put those up first. Since this particular website runs from newest to oldest, you’ll find them below. When you get to the Giant Burger entry, you’re caught up. But Christ, it’s been so long, you’ve probably forgotten the earlier entries anyway. So go ahead and keep reading. Have a glass of wine and make an evening of it).

Heh, one of my “lost” entries turns out to be a blank document titled “Wii Love Christmas, Oh Yes Wii Do.” I evidently never got past the title, but my intended topic is fairly obvious: we bought a Nintendo Wii for the kids for Christmas. And yeah, I must admit, it’s pretty awesome.

Now, Logan is a teenager, not to mention an avid gamer, so I suppose it was a foregone conclusion that I would lose to him at Wii Boxing. I will say, however, that in an actual fight, I could totally kick his punk ass. I’m sure he would disagree (since he tends to disagree with EVERYTHING I say). Anyway, li’l Kendyl does the bulk of the Wii playing these days (a scant four months later). I personally haven’t touched the thing since January. I just don’t do video games. Yeah, I know, the Wii is more than just a game machine. I could use it for exercise, drop some pounds, get in better shape, etc. I’m aware of this. I’ll get around to it. Really. No, I mean it. I do.

What else has happened lately…? Um…. Well, Sierra got “promoted” from Treble Choir to Concert Choir without the formality of an audition. She has a beautiful voice, so this was a nice validation for her.

(It seems I don't have a picture of Sierra in her choir robe. This hilarious picture will have to suffice for now.)

What else…? Logan made the tennis team. In fact, he won his first match just a few days ago, which was a nice validation for him.

Isaac has continued practicing the guitar every chance he gets, and he’s turned out to be quite a talented player. He’s been in two bands so far, but right now he’s laying low in between gigs (not much validation there, I imagine, but hopefully the fact that his dad is mega-impressed helps).

Girl Scout Kendyl managed to outsell the other girls in her troupe (by a wide margin) on the recent Girl Scout cookie sale. In fact, they made her wear the Thin Mint costume (likely some form of retaliation; who says 8 year-olds can’t be bitter?).

Otherwise, it’s been a pretty quiet few months. Until April, that is, when two pretty significant things happened. First and foremost, Logan turned 16. In keeping with the tradition established last year when Sierra turned 16, I put together a video presentation for him, basically an encapsulation of his life so far using both video footage and slideshows. There was an initial concern that there wouldn’t be enough video (Teresa wasn’t as vigilant with the camcorder as I was with Sierra and Isaac), so my intent was to pad things out with lots of pictures. As I got further into the project, well…. the damned thing got longer and longer. And since I’d procrastinated my way into a frenzied last-minute marathon of video editing, there wasn’t time to go back and trim stuff out. The project (titled Evil Boy Genius: The Logan Story) ended up with a running time of well over two hours (it’s so long, in fact, that it takes TWO DVDs to hold it all!). As tradition dictates, the video had its “world premiere” on his birthday (4/08). At the end, he called it “epic.” And I’ve gotta admit, it turned out pretty fucking great. So great, in fact, that Sierra’s video from last year looks somewhat primitive by comparison (I should point out that I have much better equipment and software at my disposal now, which makes a huge difference). After Isaac’s video is finished (he turns 16 in July), I’m planning to go back and redo Sierra’s, to bring it up to the same level. I know, it’s kind of a George Lucas-y thing to do, but I left a ton of stuff out the first time around, so I’m really looking forward to revisiting it.

But anyway, back to Logan’s birthday: Teresa and I pulled a surprise Silly String attack on him, in front of all his friends no less.

The other significant thing that happened in April requires a bit of backstory.

When I was young (eight, nine years old) and living in Aloha (a suburb of Beaverton), my best friend was a kid named Jeff Morton. We met in the second grade and totally hit it off. We had the same interests (Star Wars, GI Joe, comic books, etc), so we were a natural match. His family had more money than mine, so he always had the cooler toys (he had the coveted Millennium Falcon, while I was stuck with a lousy Snowspeeder). He also had a hot older sister, which didn’t hurt (at least she seemed hot to my pre-pubescent eyes; I think her name was Donna, but my memory isn’t exactly reliable).

After two years of friendship, my parents dropped the equivalent of a nuclear bomb on my skinny young ass: we were moving. I was devastated. I should mention that we were moving to Aurora, which is only about 23 miles away, but I was a third grader, and we didn’t have computers or cell phones back then, so it may as well have been the other side of the world. Jeff and I managed to maintain the friendship for a few more years, getting together as often as possible, but as we approached high school…. Well, we just kinda lost touch.

Fast forward to around 1997. I was married to my first wife, Sierra and Isaac were little kids, and the internet had completely changed my life. Suddenly the entire world was at my disposal. I found myself wondering whatever happened to Jeff, and set out on a mission to find him. I Alta Vista’d him (the 1997 equivalent of Googling) and sent emails to every Jeff Morton I could find. I got a few replies, but none of them were the right Jeff Morton. My search went nowhere. In the ensuing years, I looked again, but never found him. A couple of years ago, the appearance of MySpace gave me a new avenue, but again, nothing came of my search. As MySpace gave way to Facebook, I continued my search, always coming up empty.

Until about the first of April, that is. I was at the library, killing yet another lunch hour online, and I plugged his name into Facebook yet again. And there he was. He’d just recently created his profile, so there wasn’t much information, but the picture was unmistakable. It was him. And as fate would have it, he lives in Portland. FUCKING PORTLAND, a scant 12 miles from me!

So we’ve exchanged a few messages, nothing big. I imagine at some point we’ll get together. But honestly, and I can’t stress this enough, finding Jeff Morton was one of the five things I wanted to accomplish before I die. So yeah, it’s pretty cool.

I dug through my box of old pictures, hoping to find a shot of Jeff and I, but came up empty. I know I've got a few someplace....