Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

Walking back from the post office today, I think I learned to dance with my hips while listening to Chuck Berry on the iPod.

If dancing badly is not something I needed to atone for, I don't know what is.

I rinsed them a lot and fried for a long time...

Yeah, I should probably not eat alone.

anymore.

I think it can be interpreted, in text anyway, as sort of aggressive or otherwise off-putting. In any case I do it to much.

So... no more.

Just one inch below the pipe. Given relatively light usage (me out of town a lot, Mom just left Sunday), that's not great.

Called the septic people and set up a Monday morning appointment to pump it out.

This cold or whatever is not leaving me alone.

And it's helping keep me from even the easy work things I know need to get done, and so we get the never-welcome follow-up e-mails from clients. UGH. Re-asking questions I've half composed answers to. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.

Mom was thinking about Cassidy, and how he needs to see some of his neighbors' homes. When he was here, he asked her where the downstairs bathroom was.

"You don't have any?"

Dad would not be happy. Middle-class children were bad enough.

"What's the collective known for a group of bats?"

"When the dead birds are brought in, they have all kinds of parasites on them."

(that's a good thing)

Aack!
- Does anyone know what version of CiviCRM we are using? Version of Drupal?

I have to leave home at 10 a.m.

In Bolton by 11 a.m.

Manchester by 2 p.m. How bad is that?

http://www.mapquest.com/mq/6-Kl5XtXtX

A half hour at Rich and Manda's and then to the mountain by 4 p.m.

Two hour hike takes three hours, we're still good reaching the summit at 8 p.m. worst case scenario?

Combined direction:
http://www.mapquest.com/mq/3-*9aVZexz1aRJkzXY

(and all the times look better if you take it off "Shortest Distance" as Cathy pointed out...

Old note.

Bikeriding through some of the poorest sections of St. Louis, starting just a block from the mansions where Ian lives, I thought for the first time ever— if some people here were to try to beat me up just because I'm white and not evidently poor, I wouldn't blame them.

I would be fighting back viciously, but I would understand where they were coming from.

This is the economic and social insanity of having little opportunity to do anything productive and unmet needs at the same time.

So the mansion is now mostly restored! Lights on and all. I can't believe it.

M and I explored by flashlight the gardens and especially the area with all the contoured paths and seats and structures and the little crafted ponds with some large frogs.

I didn't notice which towns each police car came from but I bet it was one each from Wellesley, Natick, and Dover.

After two passed right by us on our way out the third one stopped.

"Did you hear loud music coming from anywhere around here?"

"Yes, we think there's a wedding party in the function hall up here."

The server failed just before my grandfather and I were to take my friends Manda and Rich to Provincetown by boat for the 2008 Carnival's Gay Pride parade (or LGBTQQIAF pride I think gets all the current acronyms). I started trying to take triage measures using wireless on the pier but we drove home for more reliable wireless.

I felt so bad my crisis was messing up their one day, that they'd both only barely gotten off from work in the first place.

i offered to do the lines for the boat and have them leave me at the pier, but Grandpa didn't want to go without me as a deck hand

Watching old James Bond movies I hold my breath along with the action underwater to see if I can do it, and usually can. Ha! It's not the same at all. I don't think I was under the boat for more than 30 seconds, 45 tops. Not that I was counting or even thinking about counting.

Swimming under the boat, the mental and physical effort of working on an insane knot, and knowing you have to get out from under the boat without being caught in the line or the propeller itself— well, it's a whole lot more than holding your breath.

I'm falling in love with this girl through her blog.

In different ways than in person, more elements of her personality show. I didn't say anything meeting in person.

No sense injecting weirdness into a very nice, new, casual friendship. When distance, at least for now, prevents it from being more anyway.

Who leaves the thermostat set at all in August? And since when does August fall to 64 degrees?

i've been partying harder than working -- it's an interesting change, but same effects of sleep deprivation
... what I like to call "enhanced ADD"

Outside Chicago's Union Station, I just saw a man pick up a half-used cigarette. And he wasn't asking for money like a couple other people were. He could be me, white guy maybe my age, except he had a little more attention to style (though I'm in the shorts G bought and the Agaric T-shirt!). He was probably wearing his socks right though.

Really drives home the obvious fact that people don't ask for handouts because they want to, as if they have other options that are just a little harder.

In St. Louis at the Tivoli theater.

Reaffirmed my hatred of unjust inequality and highlighted the insanity of a dysfunctional economic system that rewards smiling right at rich tourists more than productive hard work.

Most certainly made my obsession with not wasting food worse, although that wasn't an issue really for even the peasant family profiled.

Hopefully scared me into working harder as soon as I stop procrastinating by writing about it.

AKA the cleaning out Ian's refrigerator before his trip to Massachusetts and Pennsylvania banquet at Ian's place in Saint Louis, this was around Friday of the week after Unity, so one of the first days of August I believe.

I cooked:

Kate's carrots, chopped more or less in short strips or quartered, slanted rounds. Three and a half carrots I think.

A big white onion and a few small regular (yellow?) onions

The gigantic zucchini from Ian's neighbors' garden (which was the point)

Garlic, chopped.

Fresh ginger, chopped.

Fresh cilantro. I think.

Message from Brad Eller:

Cocktail hour!

07/24 6:30 PM (5:30 Chicago time)

And a later one:

Hey Kara,

I just figured out that

"Fwd: Where are you? We have parties to go to!"

is the text that Dan forwarded to me after you sent it to the business phone.

You were really trying to get me in trouble, weren't you?

:-P

Kara Andrade:

"At the middle of the line to see Obama. Right next to the bathrooms. Come on up!"
7/27 10:50 a.m. (9:40 a.m. Chicago time)