Ingenius....or bright like a peice of drift wood....

You ever do something that you know is stupid.....but you do it anyway? I’m not talkin’ about one of those things that’s dangerous but it’s so fun you can’t help it. I’m talkin’ about....well.....accidental attempted suicide. Where was I when Bill Engval was handin’ out signs.......So earlier tonight I get this wild hair....and decide to change all the light bulbs in the whole house.

We had some mix matchin’ going on that just drove me nuts. I’m one of them freaks that can’t stand it when something is uneven. Ya, one of those guys. So, I replace everything. Kitchen, dining room, living room, bedroom, bathroom....closets.....and family room. Now I have a box of mix match bulbs that would make Thomas Edison proud.

No more burned out lights. No more candle lit 20 watt next to the supreme indoor / outdoor 120 watt X-Ray CANNON! I took lights out of my bed room tonight that look like they came out of some underground excavation equipment! Reading the wattage on some of these babies solves one mystery for me. My gas bill is so low because there’s a hundred thousand BDU heat wave coming off of half the fixtures in my house!

I have several small burns on my hands because I....well....I can’t just sit there and wait for them to cool off before I take them out. I tried an oven mitt. Those things are just too beafy. Anywayz.....So now I’m done. I’ve got every light in the house on and I can hear the wheel on my meter spinning outside. Finally I begin shutting everything down. I really had no choice. I could hardly see through the pretty purple spots in my eyes.

I’m so pleased with my work that I sing while I’m flipping switches. "Every light in the house is on......front porch looks like runway lights....." No I don’t like country. "The front porch light is out!" The sound comes from one of the kids I think. I stop and cringe when I hear it. Like Elmer Fud before he fills up with read stuff and blows smoke out of his ears.

How could I have forgotten the front porch? It’s the most important light on the property! It’s my California upbringing. Moments later I have my tool box and I’m on the front porch....in the dark....no flashlight. There are two fixtures on the front porch and both are out. I go right to work. I start with the one closest to the front door.

Keep in mind that we just moved into this place and I am not familiar with this particular style of porch light. Something I should probably do in the day time right? Not me. I must do this now! I finally locate a screw. Just one on top. I press my finger against the screw so that I can tell by the mark on my finger what kind of screw it is. Smart thinkin’ right? "Gawd what a dork," I think to myself.....because I CAN’T SEE MY FINGER......woohoooo!!!! So I take a "shot in the dark" and use my philips.

Bingo we have a match! First try too. I can taste the falling dust through the big stupid grin on my face. I remember thinking..."Hey, this thing is kinda’ pretty." It’s black iron with several panes of glass. I touch the screw driver to the only screw I can find and as soon as I do the big chunk with all the glass falls off and smashes onto the porch! I stand there for a moment poised in this odd position....contemplating the laws of physics. Perhaps the loud crash wasn’t the glass breaking?

I look down to discover that the fixture smashed all the light bulbs I had so carefully placed in a bag and on the porch....right at my feet. No, we’re still not to the stupid part yet. This is just life's way of setting it up. I take the piece and the shards of glass in the house and too my room where I super glue them back together in record time. Luckily only one pane broke and another came loose.

I built a rocket ship out of pickup truck parts and super glue once....that’s a completely different blog. Now I have returned to the porch. I replace the light bulb. I turn the light on. The light works. I move all my junk to the next fixture which is on the top of a black pipe sticking out of the deck..porch...thing...y. There are two panes of glass busted out of it. I look back at the fixture by the front door and quickly calculate the odds that I’m responsible for breaking the glass in this one as well.

Finding no broken glass on the ground and deck around the light leads me to believe that the light fixture......had been broken "previously". I know.....I should work for CSI right? I find a screw and pop the top off. There’s no light bulb. Urrrr!!! No wonder it didn’t work! After all, I’m just a woogy without a squiggle!!! Daaaurr! I take a light bulb out of my pocket...now there’s a safe place.....and attempt to screw it into the socket.

It won’t go in? Raaaagggy? Why? I climb on top of the railing around the deck...porch and look strait down into it. That little voice inside my head says to me...."Hey genius! What do you see?!!"...."Nothing!" I reply. "And why is that?" he says back to me. "Because it’s DARK OUTSIDE!" I say out loud....just realizing that the neighbors car is running. I didn’t look to see if anyone was listening.

Now I’m back in the house looking for the flashlight that I should have taken out there with me in the first place. "Where’s the flashlight?" I say, admiring for a moment all the pretty lights I had put in earlier. "Car!" someone yells. I go get keys, I go to car, I unlock car and retrieve flashlight. I take flash light and point it at my eye and turn it on....because I had to make sure it worked!

Duh! So now I’m one eyed willy or it feels like that anyway after taking a white hot beam of maglite out the back of the head! Half blind I climb once again up onto the railing. I look strait down into the socket to find half a light bulb. Don’t you hate that? What do I do now? I gotta’ get it out right? I jump down, walk over to the front door, reach inside and turn off the switch to the front porch light.

This is where stupid comes in. You can already see it coming can’t you? I think for a second that I should probably find the breaker that channels power to the front porch lights. But I don’t wanna’ do that. That would take a long time.

I put my gloves on and grab a pair of needle nose pliers out of my tool box. I climb the railing once again flashlight in left hand pliers in right. I touch the pliers the the little tiny wires sticking out of what’s left of the base of the bulb. Nothing. "Must be safe," I think to myself. I can hear the other voice in my head laughing quietly.

I reach in and carefully bend one side of the base of the bulb inward. So far so good. I go to do the same thing to the other side when zzzt BAM!!! "If the earth is spinning so fast, then why don’t we all fall off?" Was what went through my head. Completely blinded by the flash that lit up the whole inside of my empty head, I start to fall backwards.

I stick my left foot out to try to land it..."TOOL BOX!" Then with my other left foot....."UUUU....Top of the light fixture??" CRUNCH! Congratulations! You’ve just won a brand new light fixture!!!! Boom!! Onto the deck! Dear Gawd my reeaaar end!!!! I still had the flashlight in my left hand....where were my pliers? Any welders out there?

Yup, my pliers had been arched to the base of the light fixture. Even now pink squiggles are floating around the room everywhere I look. I called Dad to ask him some stuff.....some ’lectric stuff. He was asleep. I decided that the light was like that probably because the exact same thing had happen to someone else. This didn’t make me feel any smarter. I packed it up and went inside thinking that perhaps my life had flashed before my eyes but the blinding arch was so bright that I couldn’t see it.
I’ve decided to buy the house just so that I can rip that fixture right off the deck.
It’s a nice house........

SNOW!!

Can you believe how much snow we've got this year? Maybe it doesn't seem particularly amazing to anyone else. Maybe I'm just easily amused. Where I'm from you have to drive to the mountains in the winter time to see any snow. Here it just falls everywhere. I like snow. I've heard enough to believe that I might be the only one in the state that likes snow. Everyone else complains about it. I like snow because it stops the whole world. It's just a bunch of tiny ice flakes and it stops everything. Time stands still.

I look out side and think to myself, "Self, I couldn't get anything done today even if I wanted to." My self replies back, "Well then, just sit your lazy butt down in that chair and light up that play station!" No time for that. I'm on my P.C. doin' band stuff. So ya, snow stops everything but the band. What I really love is driving in it. When we get dumped on by a sky full of white, I live for a phone call that puts me in the drivers seat whether I like it or not.

Stick the burban in 4 wheel and go!! God help me if I see an empty parking lot after it's nice and packed. I'll shut the 4 wheel drive down and do doughnuts until I barf!!!! I always have some trucker come up to me and say..."You know if you hit a dry spot you'll tip that thing over right?" If the truckers think I'm nuts.......hmmmm. Not like it's real dangerous. I have a friend that use to have a VW bug. When it got icy out he'd load up his bug with friends and off they'd go. His favorite thing to do was to get up to a good 35mph and pull the E brake.

Uuuuu....ya. That's kinda' what I said. For those that don't know, pulling the E brake on ice puts you into a spin. Consider this.....Bug+E brake+35mph=time machine! It took me awhile to figure it out but I'm pretty sure my friend is actually me. I just spun one too many times and wound up stuck in the recent past. Don't think about that too hard. You know what? The first thing I did when I moved to Kansas was play in the snow. I was 19.

I moved out here Jan. of 93'. Blizzard!!!! I thought I was dreaming! I flipped out and built a massive wall out of snow that was about 9ft tall and 3 ft thick. Amy's sister Jen might remember that. I had to put her on my shoulders so she could finish up the top. I think we tried to build an igloo too. Snow days are awesome too. They didn't have snow days in California. They had what they called rainy day schedule. If it rained they'd cut the day short and everyone would be sent home at lunch. Wild, right? It wasn't really rain either. It was like a sprinkle in Kansas.

I remember one time it actually snowed in Modesto. You couldn't really see it but they said that it was snow. They practically declared a state of emergency. It was awesome. None of it stuck and everyone completely lost it! Aaaaah, the power of snow. Check this out.

One time me and my boy Jamie were on our way to work in his Jeep. This thing had a soft top and no real heater. We're haulin' arsss down an old highway between Mac and Hesston when this oncoming van looses control and heads strait for us. We had nowhere to go so we went off the road into a creak. The creak wasn't deep but we did find our self literally buried in snow. We couldn't see out of the windows. After a few minutes in FWD we decide we're stuck.

Jamie tell me I should call into to work and tell them we won't be in. While I'm on the phone leaving a recording for our supervisor he's trying to get his Jeep out. Several times I go back and forth telling then...."Ya, we're not gonna' be there....oh wait a second....we almost got it......nope, doesn't look like we're gonna' make it......no no, hold on...ok we're good!.....scratch that, we're back under a drift again.......Finally we got out of there. My props to the almighty Jeep. We were late but we made it.

Unfortunately at AGCO late and absent were the same thing.

Well, that was all pretty pointless.....YAAAAWNnnnnn.....RAARrr.....Bed time.