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I couldn't resist putting this Obama Jib-Jab piece in...if you choose to view it, keep in mind that this was debuted in front of the President at the recent White House Correspondents Dinner.

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Its time to hire and train a few replacements at the call center. I'm sure the recently reduced pay will still attract some highly qualified candidates. Thirteen days remain among the acres of cubicles before I get control of my time again, and can seek some new direction. I've been offered part time work, which would have sounded good at one time, but now I'm afraid I've crossed the burnout threshold, and even a couple of days a week don't sound appealing.

I hate to give up a steady income at a time when all the swindles and fraud that have permeated the economy continue to have an adverse affect on my savings and "investments", but I guess I can afford to coast for a while. Maybe I can even create and accumulate enough art work to have a shot at some sort of commercial venue, like a local gallery.

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Next time you hear about some new form of financial innovation, or pernicious legislative compromise, or are beset by erratic drivers while on the road, or must contend with corporate employment, or are forced to view commercial television with the attendant advertising, or any number of additional trials of everyday life in our fine country, perhaps you can make use of the following lists I ran across the other day between calls at the Happy Fun Work Place while accumulating the weekly pittance...

I.Q. Scales as Classified by Psychologists

Idiot - 0-25
Imbecile - 26-50
Moron - 51-70

Profound mental retardation Below 20
Severe mental retardation 20-34
Moderate mental retardation 35-49
Mild mental retardation 50-69
Borderline intellectual functioning 70-79



Have fun - now you can better assort those who brighten your day with their simple antics, perhaps rendering an opinion from the Supreme Court or making a pronouncement from a right-wing think tank on a pseudo-news cable channel, or formulating ways to generate eight-figure paydays for executive management by lowering wages and increasing the burden of the most humble of workers...

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My time to leaving the Big IT Company where my contract has had me cubicleized and tethered to a phone for the past seven months is now down to less than four weeks. I had recently been mulling over the incentives for leaving, having attained the six-month mark that was my original minimum objective when I hired on, and an email arrived advising me to expect a pay cut soon. This at a place where the CEO took home over $42,500,000 the year before - anda 68% pay increase.

Uh, no. I gave them a month's notice, and now the days click off until July 10th, when I can log off the phone and case tracking systems for the last time.

So it will soon be time to paint, and to spend some quality time with the aging and increasingly frail Mdog.

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Before I left Paradise in Northern California a little over a week ago, I asked Freddie and Mike to show me where Betty and Fred Seereiter had been laid to rest in a cemetery near the place where the reunion took place. Betty and Fred were very kind people who welcomed me many times into their home, and treated me like family. I had holiday dinners there, joyful breakfasts, and played a lot of poker while swilling cheap beer. In many ways it was more carefree and loving than any time I would ever spend with my own parents.

I note that Fred's birthday is the same day in April as my father's, and Betty's birthday is this Thursday. It was good to pay my respects to them, under the big redwood that now towers over their little plot of ground.

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I spent a lot of time this spring getting a nice vegetable and flower garden together. While there are frustrating things about living here in this neighborhood in a high-maintenance house, I was feeling pretty good about the coming season of fresh herbs, flowers, and organically grown vegetables. Sadly, I forgot that in Colorado 'gardening' is defined as 'putting out tender plants for the hail to pulverize'.

I go home from work yesterday and on turning down our street I kew right away what all the shredded leaves in the street from the trees overhead meant. A big cumulonimbus had parked overhead and dumped hail on us for a big Colorado "Fuck you, gardeners!". About half of what I had carefully nurtured was reduced to shredded stalks or unrecognizable green mush. I think that will be the last time I mess with gardening until we move to a more hospitable state.

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I returned home last night to the middle-of-nowhere Denver airport after a 45-minute flight delay from Oakland and a frustrating half hour waiting in the cold wind on a diesel-fumed island waiting for a shuttle bus to the far-away parking acreage. When I called home from the car to check in, Pat let me know that Mdog was ill, with no appetite and no interest in her walks. He even cooked eggs, one of her favorites and she walked away from her bowl without a bite. When I finally arrived at the house around nine o'clock she seemed happy to see me, but I could see the difference from a week before.

This morning I took her to a nearby vet, and had them really look into her condition. She's about 80 years old in human terms, so I was relieved to find that while there were a lot of small irregularities, there was no major problem that could be considered a crisis.

One of the possible causes for the heath scare the vet suggested was the presence of some recent stress. When I told her I had just returned from six days away from home, she gave me an 'aha' look. "I can tell she's really atatched to you", she said, "and that could be the cause, or part of it". This unfortunately reinforced my fear that Mdog wouldn't cope well with my being away at this point in her old deaf life.



Now I have a pile of medications to sort through two or three times a day for the next week or so.

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A very enjoyable drive along the Western flank of the Sierra foothills brought me to Paradise around mid day today. Freddie and I used to come up here a few times a year with the dogs to spend a weekend with his parents Betty and Fred and occasionally other siblings and their families who were in town for the same reason. A few times we went tubing in a local river, but spent most of the time drinking beer, having great meals, and playing poker.


Freddie's sister Susie offers a bloody mary to the gathering crowd.


A large portion of the Seereiter clan on the lawn by the pool.

Betty and Fred are gone now, but the extended family comes together here every year and takes over a nice motel with a pool and spends the day drinking and eating, catching up and occasionally dancing on the big lawn.


Dancing girls...

Last year, I heard Mike and Freddie talking about this event, and saw some photos. I decied to try and attend this year if possible, and it worked out well with the other visits I wanted to have.


A tired dog (one of five here today).

Many of the family I had not seen for 25 years...some of Freddie's nieces and nephews who were in their early teens are now 40-ish. What a sense of time passing! Like the forest that has replaced a hayfield next to a childhood home I visited last fall.


Freddie and husband Mike (the legal kind!) in the pool. They have been together for 23 years.

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I drove over the Sierras yesterday from Reno under threatening skies, but ultimately made it with only a few swipes of the wipers.



After exiting I-80 and heading South from Auburn on the old gold country Highway 49, I soon began to encounter the kind of scenes that make me occasionally nostalgic for California .





I stopped a few times for photos and a fruit stand for fresh local cherries, then arrived in Georgetown around four in the afternoon. Arriving at my friend Dave's house, I found him standing in his driveway, smoking a cigar.

I met Dave when I was 20 years old, shortly after I arived in San Francisco in 1972. He was a Navy air traffic controller, and I found it easier to relate to him than the San Francisco guys I met as I explored the emerging liberated population of Castro, Folsom, and Polk streets. I lived at the time in a fourth floor apartment in a victorian buildind a block off Polk with a roomate who was dating Cleve Jones at the time, who later was instrumental in creating the AIDS quilt project.

I'm putting a picture in that doesn't make Dave identifiable, because I suspect he would wish to maintain a low profile in his rural town (not that anyone living there would ever visit here).


Dave surveys some of the trees covering his five acreas of a Gold Country hillside in the early morning mist from his back deck.

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Becky picked me up at the Reno airport this afternoon. We stopped at a Trader Joes so I could gawk at all the stuff I miss from there in Colorado and grab a few snacks to tide us over to dinner and for breakfast. We have a nice local market in Fort Collins near the house, but there's nothing quite like a TJ's.



After I had a much-needed nap we walked around Becky's new place and checked everything out. Visited with her horses for a while. Later, I took Becky our for her birthday dinner to a favorite Thai restaurant.



Tomorrow morning, we need to get going a bit early so Becky can assist with a hip replacement surgery at 9:30, then she'll take me to the car rental place near the hospital so I can pick up my vehicle for the trip across the mountains to Georgetown and the gold country of the Sierra western foothills (and ex-husband #1).

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Well, the journey West is underway, as I am now in Oakland waiting for a connecting flight to Reno to see Becky and her new house.

I have a new small PC (a 'netbook') with me on this trip, to see how that works out as a travel tool. Not so sure at this point that the extra hassle is worth it, but willing to give it a try.

One thing this provides is a way to use Skype with a little Bluetooth headset we had laying around to make free calls home (or wherever) any time the PC is fired up. SO far that works OK, and was surprisingly easy to get running last night.

The airport stuff has been as dreadful as I remember, with the usual overblown Security Theatre

Well, about time to board the plane for the next leg, so I need to pack up all this stuff. Had a chance to eat the sandwich I packed for the trip (I know, I am so cheap...so I won't be too desperate for the little cracker snack the Southwest crew hands out.

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Boy, this daily blogging thing is harder than I thought. There's a backlog of stuff for the weekends, and work nights leave very little time for anything but the essentials. Only another six weeks for that, if I don't chicken out and extend some more!

Pictured above is the amazing shipment of cookies from our dear friend Arlene in California, who somehow finds the time to bake world-class cookies, and is generous enough to stand in line line during her lunch hour then pay a premium for fast shipping to ensure that her treats arrive fresh. We always freeze some and spread out the luxury of home-baked from scratch cookies.

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Mona was here from Wyoming for the weekend, finishing up her series of advanced workshops for Buddhist Shambhala practitioners at the local center. I was there one night a week myself for the past four weeks enrolled in a program called Money as Path - trying to gain some better perspective on how money affects our lives, behavior, and attitudes. Or is it the other way around?



It is always a treat to have Mona here, and I really look forward to the visits. But with the stress of our daily lives here, and the minimal amount of time we get to hang out while she is here for a program every day, I'm afraid I don't always show my appreciation or express how much the time with her means to me. She actually thanked me for 'putting up with her' as she prepared to leave this morning before I went to work. Whoa, it was her that had to put up with me!

There have been some pleasant aspects of life in Fort Collins, and our house offers many fine amenities, but we really feel like it is time to move on and find the next chapter in our lives. But the one irreplaceable aspect we will miss the most and gives us pause is the proximity of Mona and Clark, and the ranch in Wyoming.

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