We met up with Dr. Greg & his daughter Kayla in Parkville today and rode the river back to Kansas City.

Greg had recently acquired a sweet vintage aluminum canoe and was itching to get it out on the river, and I’d been stoked about spending some more time on the Mighty Mo after the Trashboat Regatta (yep, I’m hooked!) Joel had gone out with a couple of friends the week before and arranged to borrow Mike’s extra kayak for the following week.

Joel took this, and all following photos.

I don’t know if you can make out the expression on my face, but it’s a grin of almost face-cramping proportions. I was really, really having a good time. I dig this whole kayaking thing a whole lot. I was having a lot of fun just paddling back and forth between Greg’s canoe and Joel’s kayak, practicing turning around, slowing up, etc. I am looking forward to getting better at maneuvering it, and just plain getting out on the water more regularly. Sometime after we get our job situations more stable, I think we’re going to be looking to buy a couple of secondhand kayaks!

We came upon the most peculiar crenelated belvedere of some kind. My guess is that at some point in time it was connected with riverboat/barge shipping or other navigation, but who knows? It’s obviously been in disuse for quite a while; all the window glass is broken out and there’s a small tree growing out of the roof.

Downtown skyline in a haze of humidity – it was a very hot and muggy day, but down on the river, it felt pretty good.

Kayla & Greg cruising along. Whenever they got well in the channel, that canoe slipped along pretty darn smoothly. It seemed to handle the wake from a sand-barge with fair grace, as well.

Landing the canoe at Kaw Point. It felt a little disturbing to deliberately run aground up the boat-ramp, but apparently that’s the way you do it. When Joel took this picture, I was clumsily stirring my way upstream toward the ramp. I kept getting myself crossed up in the current and spinning wide, lazy loop-di-loos. I think I made three complete circles before I got the hang of it and was able to land!

It was a damn fine day to be out on the river. The river is still surprisingly high, so we didn’t have to worry too much about sand-bars. There were a couple of suspicious looking sinks/whirlpools, a bit of whitewatery looking stuff indicating sunken hazards, and the disturbing wake left by a river-boat pushing a barge loaded with sand dredged up from the channel. We were keeping our eyes open for trouble, though, and managed to steer clear of mishap. I must admit that the choppiness of the wake had me fairly severely nervous, and I felt kind of sick to my stomach before we got out of it. I did as Joel said and kept my kayak pointed into the waves and just rolled with them.

We saw a lot of wildlife, mostly avian, while we were out. Easily 20 blue herons, probably a dozen hawks, and several generations of geese. I got to see a gaggle of late-season goslings disporting themselves alongside the bank. They were leaving the water as I passed, hopping nimbly up the sandy riverbanks and waddling away into the weeds. They were still at that grey-and-yellow fuzzy stage that is so gawkily adorable. Greg and Kayla spotted a large emission of heron poop, but I feel fortunate that I missed that spectacle. Greg reported that the better portion of a whole fish carcass was represented. Can you say “eeeewwww!”? I know I can!

I told Joel that I think I may consider paddling about on the river to be one of those supremely theraputic things, like mountain biking or lighting off smoke bombs. I don’t know if I have ever waxed poetic about my love of smoke bombs here before, but I do seriously dig lighting them off. I know they’re pansy fireworks, fit only for children and the feebleminded, but I find something about them deeply calming and satisfying. I have, when beset by a lingering melancholy, found great improvement in my state of mind after burning off a baggie of smoke bombs. Due to my impecunious state this year, I didn’t re-stock my supply, but when I was cleaning my workroom today, I discovered two more baggies of smoke bombs left over from last year. I’m saving them for a really urgent need.

That being explained, I expect few people will enjoy the following video as much as I did, but here is a 5 minute video of some kids burning off smoke-bombs.

My brain was wandering today, and it wandered back to the Arizona desert, to a two day stretch when our attention was consumed by grasshoppers.

For one reason or another, on these two particular days, there were grasshoppers absolutely everywhere. They were apparently in the midst of some sort of migration. Also, they were apparently in the midst of mating season, too.

Turgid bronze ‘hoppers the size of a large man’s thumb dragged themselves across the road in an insect parody of that old Disney nature program about the lemmings who migrated off a cliff. Moreover, many were locked in coitus as they scrabbled across the hot asphalt. In fact, at points it was a regular grasshopper orgy, and an obscene daisy-chain of rutting insects would be stalled out, twitching most disgustingly on the shoulder of the road.

I tried, whenever possible, to avoid running over the stolidly marching (or languorously humping) grasshoppers. Besides being opposed to unnecessary slaughter of innocent creatures, I found the sound and resultant goo-splosion beyond nauseating.

I remember, while we were dealing with the grasshopper leg of our journey, thinking that I should write about it here the next time we got to a computer, but then the next time we did was after we’d caught a train back to KC and had gotten into more hospitable countryside, and the macabre/sexually-explicit exodus was temporarily wiped from my mind. But as with anything so hellish and bizarre, it re-surfaced and I decided I’d share it today, just to commit it to writing and also to totally gross out anybody who is still checking up on my ridiculous site. It was certainly not something you’d see every day, and thank whatever gods may be for that!

Once again I am computerless.

I’m not sure what went wrong, but earlier today I was checking my e-mail, looking for news on the presidential coup in Honduras, and listening to a Rhett & Link video, when my computer just suddenly, and without warning, STOPPED.

No error messages, no BSOD, nothing. It simply quit running stolidly, undramatically, and with a finality. It will not switch back on again, and that’s that.

So until I get some money (doubtful if ever, considering the pittance I receive from my Grocery Store Lady toils) we’re a one-computer household, and if I may be frank, Joel’s computer is incredibly slow, janky, and appears also to be on its last legs, so I’m not placing any bets on this one either.

So what I’m getting at here is that my updates will become even more infrequent than usual, and that I won’t be able to put any pictures up on Flickr, since his computer and my camera refuse to see eye-to-eye. Also, I can’t scan the disposable-camera pictures from the Trashboat Regatta, and that’s a shame, ’cause some of them came out really well.

So, until my ship comes in (or I lose my mind and siphon yet more dollars from my dwindling savings account) I’ll probably be largely a non-net-ity.

Well, let’s face it. I’m a little low on brain power lately.

I’m up to my elbows getting stuff together for the Eeeewww! Boy Cooties! race and I’m just a space-case anyway, so I’m going to link to two of the funniest, disgustingest stories I’ve read online and let you guys laugh and get grossed out, too.

One of ‘em is about strong laxatives and the other’s about a barfing hangover.

Enjoy…if you dare!

Age 11 – discovering that “Fettuccine Alfredo” is basically fancy for “Macaroni & Cheese” (a dish I’d detested since early childhood).

Age 15 – discovering that Toad The Wet Sprocket was nothing near to as zany and lighthearted as their band name.

Age 5 – discovering that the orange drink which churns tantalizingly in the translucent plastic mixer at McDonald’s basically tastes like a cross between Tang & orange-flavor Kool-Aide. It’s not nearly as exciting as it looks!

Age 7 – Snoopy Sno-Cone Machine. I think every kid who ever had one had the same experience. It’s loads of work to crank on it for ages to shave down a thimble-full of ice which you then “flavor” with foul-tasting weak Kool-Aide simulacrum. It’s messy, it takes ages, and the end result is not worth all of that effort.

Ages 13 — 18 – Being A Teenager. Man, when I was a little kid, I thought that being a teenager was going to be hella cool! You could have a perm, go on dates, wear nail polish, even DRIVE! Little did I know that adolescence is characterized by crushing social awkwardness, unpredictable mood swings, lots of acne, and a constant struggle to become more independent within the framework of familial expectations. Also, perms suck, highschool boyfriends were more trouble than they were worth, and I turned out to be a kind of lousy driver. Nail polish is okay, though.

Sometimes I go to the library, and every book I pick up is a total home-run! My most recent library expedition was such a winner.

First things first, I snagged a couple of Jean Shepherd’s collections of short stories, In God We Trust (all others pay cash) and Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories (and other disasters.” If you’re not familiar with Jean Shepherd, here’s a tip that will probably tell you that you actually are familiar with him…he’s the guy who came up with the famous 1980s holiday movie A Christmas Story and contained with in In God We Trust are several short stories that were rolled into that movie script. Nostalgia, humor, hyperbole, and semi-fictional autobiography are all descriptors that might equally be applied to Shepherd’s tales. He writes about things the way a kid really thinks about them, but of course run through the filter of an adult’s understanding. Another 1980s classic kids’ movie, Ollie Hopnoodle’s Haven Of Bliss was also mined from the Wanda Hickey collection. I think that style of nostalgic narrative resonated deeply right about then – it doesn’t seem much time elapsed between the Depression-Era Shepherd stories hitting the silver screen and the Vietnam-Era The Wonder Years hitting the small screen. While “The Wonder Years” wasn’t as overtly humorous as Shepherd’s reminiscences, a similar nostalgic tone and kid’s-eye-view links those stories and that TV show stylistically in my mind.

My next find was Too Much, Too Late by Mark Spitz, who is apparently a fairly hip music journalist. Since I don’t particularly read music reviews or magazines, I had no preconceptions about Spitz’s style or perspective. What it is, is a compelling story about a bunch of small-town guys who accidentally hit the bigtime. Four highschool buddies who’d been in an up-and-coming garage band in their just-post-highschool days reunite in their late 30s to jam on the weekends as a diversion from their less-than-inspiring daily lives. Harry, the lead singer, brings his troubled son and his son’s girlfriend to one of the jam sessions, hoping to forge a connection with his kid through music. The boy is unimpressed by his old man’s musical stylings, but the girlfriend, Natalie, who prefers to answer to “Motorrrju,” is smitten. She gushes about the band (The Jane Ashers) in her popular blog, and before long, The Jane Ashers are yanked from obscurity. The central characters are compelling, from the alcoholic slacker Sandy to the committed, slightly nebbishy small-town dad Harry, to Rudy, whose aging nerdiness comes off as surprisingly charming. Like Joe Meno, about whom I raved a while back, Spitz is an American answer to Nick Hornby, minus the overwhelming douchiness. I’m putting a request on Spitz’s “How Soon Is Never” for the next time I go to the library.

I’m right now re-reading Old Glory & The Real Time Freaks, because I was inspired by a discussion about Catcher In The Rye. Within the discussion of Catcher was the notion that Catcher no longer resonates with kids because of so many changes within youth culture, but it could remain relevant as a snapshot of the mores of a specific socioeconomic milieu within a specific era. Old Glory features a protagonist from a similar social class at a similar age – he’s the 17-year-old son of an old, upper-class Connecticut family, but it is set in quite a different era – late 1960s rather than early 1950s and a lot has changed. While the characters are fundamentally different, with Catcher’s Holden being introverted and gloomy and Glory’s Quintus being confident and laid back, the stories follow completely different trajectories due to their historical moment. In Old Glory Quintus Ells has committed to writing a letter to the future (he presumes he will have a grandson in 100 years who will read Quintus’s circa 1969 musings). He has given himself 38 days in which to write up everything that he thinks is relevant about who he is and what his grandson should know about his life and times. At the end of that 38 days, Quintus will turn 18 and will become eligible for the draft, a despised duty which he does not contemplate dodging although it is firmly at odds with his freewheeling, grass-smoking lifestyle. As the narrative reveals Quintus’s feelings about his girlfriend, his friends, his family, and his prospects in the world, his love of marijuana, and his ethically dubious pursuit of a horny, pregnant, wrong-side-of-the-tracks typist, this book paints a colorful portrait of the lifestyle and expectations of a certain sort of guy at a very specific period in American history. With youth culture in full swing, kids were allowed to be seen in a more complex light, with real troubles, strengths, and opinions. Where Holden was stifled by expectations that he should be a happy-go-lucky kid, Quintus had the freedom to be elated about his last grasp at responsibility-free youth before that fateful 18th birthday. I think that on the whole Quintus is simply a more sympathetic character; while he, like Holden, is outside of the mainstream, he is comfortable there and fairly contentedly takes his pleasures as he finds them. He has plenty to be conflicted over, but instead chooses his last fling with hedonism before he has to truly commit to adult concerns.

Given the vast influence of the Baby Boomers, it surprises me that this book has not only gone out of print, but never made much of an impact on the teen fiction market. As a coming-of-age novel, Old Glory is incredibly pertinent: it sends a highly believable character through a set of rites-of-passage that are notably historically specific. The writing is free-flowing, natural, and enjoyable; Quintus’s “voice” sounds natural, friendly, and convincing. Read sandwiched between Catcher In The Rye and Hairstyles Of The Damned you could take in quite a survey of (male) Coming-Of-Age in America in the last half of the 20th Century.

The formidable prow of my trashboat veered toward a parked car.

I corrected, and the whole thing lurched toward the oncoming lane.

I corrected again and nearly lumbered straight into the curb in my own lane. I could see that this was going to be a very long half mile ahead of me, and I decided not to borrow trouble in thinking about the 6.5 mile ride back from Glow In The Dark Park just yet.

By the time I got to the bottom of the hill and had to make the turn to head out to Kaw Point, I’d gotten a little bit more of a grip on steering/riding/driving my craft on dry land, but not much of a grip when all was said and done. I pedaled, braked, wove back and forth, and offered up impassioned prayers to nonexistent gods that I might make it out to the Point basically unscathed.

We made it!

Backing things up to the beginning, I guess I could say these shenanigans began last winter. Unemployed, bored, and still regaining my grasp on reality after our coast-to-coast tour, I started daydreaming up events for the summer that could infuse a little more surreality and silliness into the admittedly already-colorful Kansas City cycling scene. Inspired by the ChVnk 666 Aquachoppers and the Rat Patrol’s Trashboats I thought it would be an AWESOME idea if some of our local mad-inventors would build some boats out of old crap and we’d float ‘em from one of our two local, accessible boat ramps to the other.

So I started combing the Internet for examples of amphibious bicycles, made a special page here at Meetzorp.com, and started telling people about my Big Idea. In May, I made some flyers and started handing them out, leaving them at bike and coffee shops, and generally hoping that would get the word out. I got a lot of questions and a few interested noises, but sadly a lot of folks who were interested also had commitments on the weekend of the Regatta. Ah well, there’s always next year!

What we lacked in quantities of participants, we certainly made up for in enthusiasm.

But to back up again, there was the build, which happened basically on Friday and a little bit on Saturday morning. Pretty much all day on Friday, Joel was cutting lumber and bolting it around bicycle frames. Two long spars sandwiched the main triangle, then a sort of pallet was built on the front and back of the spar to support the plastic 50 gallon drums that would provide our buoyancy.


We bunjied the barrels to the racks with old, holey innertubes.

These crafts were cumbersome to ride but were gratifyingly stable in the water. Because they were finished up within hours of the Regatta kicking off, we didn’t really get to test them out, aside from riding them up and down the street to the delight, confusion, or consternation of our neighbors, depending on their respective temperaments. At the zero hour, we weren’t sure how they’d behave out on the river. Fortunately, we had really good life jackets.

So, due to the fact that I basically couldn’t control my “boat” on dry land, we decided that Joel would ride his down to ACME, and I’d follow on a regular bike, then, when the crew departed from ACME, I’d bust ass home, grab my boat, and get down to the Point as best I could (even if I had to walk and push the darn thing the whole way!)

Once we got to ACME, we got a phone call from Sean, our only other confirmed participant, letting us know that he and Idris were still bracing up their trailer, but would be on their way shortly. Ah yes, another crew as well prepared as we were, if not even less so…let the festivities begin!

After a decent interval, Sean and Idris hove into view, flanked by Niki & Jeff, bringing the F.F. Deep Purple forth, into adventure

Yes, it was raining at that point in the day. The day had dawned overcast and the threat of rain was present all day. By 3:30, it was no longer a threat, but an actuality. By 4:30, however, the storm had passed, so we decided to press on. As per plan, I buzzed off for home to get my boat and to give Vargas the keys to the truck so he could get his kayak down to the river – oh yes, we’d arranged for him to leave his kayak at our house and use the truck to take it down to the Point. Eventually, much complicated shuffling of keys, tow-bikes, and responsibilities landed Andy with the job of taking a truckload of bikes & stuff down to Glow In The Dark Park. Somehow, it all worked out.

I got to Kaw Point about 15 minutes ahead of the rest of the group and took the opportunity to reflect on the insanity of my choices and decisions. This all seemed like a perfectly cromulent idea back in February, but as I watched the branches, unidentified floating debris, and swirling muck course downstream, I started to have some economy-sized doubts.

Fortunately, these guys showed up, and my worries evaporated like the puddles from the afternoon’s brief rain shower. I figured it would be readily apparent if we’d be riverworthy or not pretty early on.

Joel put in and paddled around the launch area a bit. Success!

The Deep Purple was launched next, and surprisingly supported all four occupants (snugly, but that wasn’t a surprise). Idris & Jeff perched on the front two barrels, Niki sat on the framework behind them, and Sean straddled the rear barrel, facing backwards. Sadly, I do not have a photo of this (yet) but Mike was out in his kayak with a disposable camera, so when I get those pictures developed, I will post them.

I rolled in after the Deep Purple and had stowed my camera, double wrapped in zip-locks, just in case. I would take no more pictures until after we pulled out down at Glow In The Dark Park. Another politer, more official name for Glow In the Dark Park is Berkeley Riverfront Park, but it’s known by its alternative name to some folks who knew it before it was re-claimed and re-dedicated. It’s built on former brownfields land.

Success! It smells like river mud. Joel & Melissa roll Joel’s piratical pontoon bike up the boat ramp.

F.F. Deep Purple & crew celebrating their successful maiden voyage.

Sipping on PBRs and watching the sunset…not a bad way to celebrate.

Well, in actual fact, I should have foregone my share of the PBR (one can, in fact, because I am a pitiful lightweight) because I found that I was spectacularly unable to pilot my pontoon bike back home. I couldn’t even get it out to the end of the driveway of the boat ramp. It veered, pitched, wobbled, careened, caromed, and generally went amok while I cussed, hollered, and fought to keep it upright. I ended up chaining it to a sign post and hitching a ride back in to town with Andy and Joel’s pontoons, which were removed from his bike for easier riding.

We agreed to meet up for a very late-night dinner at Taqueria Mexicana on Southwest Boulevard, so after Andy and I dropped off the pontoons at home, we rode down to the Boulevard for some tasty, tasty Mexican food. Joel, Christi, Melissa, Jenny, and Mike were already there sipping on horchata and re-living the adventure.

Everyone involved agreed that this needs to happen again next year. Already, improved designs are being discussed, debated, and planned. Hopefully, we’ll see a bigger field next year, and with more participants, I’ll have more impetus to actually plan prizes and refreshments. Since I wasn’t sure until a few days ago that it would be anyone besides Joel and me, I slacked on prepping schwag, and have offered Team Deep Purple a batch of home-made bagels in lieu of a first-place prize

My grandpa was a hell of an interesting guy. He had the mind, heart, and soul of a mechanical engineer and a self-taught education that far surpassed the expectations of a depression-era West Virginia farmboy. He came of age in an era where aptitude could carry you just about as far as certification. A light would glow in his eye and he’d get a particular set to his jaw when he came upon something that he could improve, fix, make, or make in order to fix something else. In his retired years, he’d take it elaborate projects upon himself wherein he’d have to make a tool to complete the job.

He built a spectacular cabinet that went over the top of the fitted refrigerator in their house up in the Sierras. This fridge was boxed in, and the resulting bump-out in the laundry room perfectly fitted the washer and dryer without a bit of space going wasted. The cabinet he build over the fridge could be accessed in either the kitchen or the laundry room, and its beveled doors perfectly matched the fitted cupboards throughout the rest of the kitchen. He had to make a special cutting bit for his router in order to accomplish matching bevels in the cupboard door panels and spent one particularly satisfactory day down in his workshop shaping a piece of hardened steel to the correct curvature with his prized milling machine.

He built other fabulous features into the house that he and Grandma built up on the hill. He had a motorized dumbwaiter which ran from the basement to the living room so that he didn’t have to carry firewood up to the fireplace. He installed an ingenious hidden entry button for the electric garage doors. He built graceful, tapering, octagonal pilings for the magnificent deck that wrapped three-quarters of the way around their house.
(click image for full-size)
This is the cabinet of the dumbwaiter in the living room.

On the left, there’s Grandpa loading the dumbwaiter with luggage, and the other shot is of the dumbwaiter’s counterweight.

Here’s the front of the house looking up from behind one of Grandma’s flowerbeds. As you can imagine, a lot of work went into building this house, and my grandparents were justifiably proud of their accomplishment. Quite the digs for a retired ironworker and a retired hairdresser. They marshaled their resources cannily over the years and were willing to save dough by doing the vast majority of the work themselves.

I know I’ve posted this photo before, but I just really like how this picture of my grandparents had turned out, and now that they’re both gone, it is one of the ways I like to remember them, comfortable and happy at the house they built for themselves up in the Northern California mountains.

This is the signature stone in the center of the brick driveway he laid leading up to their garage. The lettering is brazing rod bent and pounded into grooves he’d incised into the stone. He was taken with the date 9-9-99 and planned to wrap up that particular project on that date so that he could cap it off as illustrated.

My grandparents often made their visits to my folks during the summertime, so as to take best advantage of their grandkids’ summer vacations, and also because my Grandpa craved a good thunderstorm or two. They rarely got thunderstorms in either San Jose, where he and Grandma had lived from the mid-60s until the early 1990s, nor indeed up on the hill. He’d grown up in the South and spent his young adulthood in western Ohio, where summers came with all the fixins: lightning bugs, big, fat, frosty watermelons, and thunderstorms of nearly Wagnerian proportions.

On a hot July evening, Grandpa would seat himself on the front step where a fine view of the north, east, and southern skyline could be had and cheerfully observe the panorama of natural, electric pyrotechnics along the horizon. He taught us kids to count 1-Mississippi, 2-Mississippi, 3-Mississippi between seeing the flash of lightning and hearing the thunderclap to estimate how far off the storm was. He would have LOVED a Kansas City summer – already we’ve been having whopping great thunderstorms and every time a particularly showy lightning strike or booming thunderclap rolls through, I think of Grandpa sitting on the step and enthusing about the various qualities of the meteorological lightshows we Midwesterners are particularly privileged to enjoy.

Because it was Summertime when my grandparents typically visited, there were free or cheap summertime festivals to attend, and attend we did. I think Grandpa genuinely enjoyed the oddments of smalltown culture; the street fairs, the extremely home-made parades, and the varieties preserves, pies, and fresh produce that could be had at bargain prices. The Ellis “Peabody” Hale Fiddling Contest (and Antique Tractor Pull) was a spectacular smash hit.

The Peabody Hale Fiddling Contest is a small town festival with all the stops pulled out. As well as the namesake and feature event of the fiddling contest and old-time music festival, there’s a quilt show that brings out the best of kaleidoscopic fabric artistry, there is a children’s penny-carnival, and of course, there’s the famous antique tractor pull, and honestly, the tractor-pull was the highlight of the day for Grandpa, Dad, and me.

The following video, isn’t from the tractor pull we went to, of course, that having been in 1987, but it’s representative of what we saw – iron juggernauts puffing and chattering and dragging a sliding weight that would steadily increase as they went along. It was awe-inspiring to watch these old tractors, some of them nearly a century old, gamely chug along and prove that although primitive, they sure had what counted.

They also had an antique thresher set up with a steam-tractor powering it and would periodically feed sheaves of oats into it to demonstrate how it cleanly separated the oats from the straw and poured each out of its respective appropriate chute. They’d had a baling machine set up, also, to take care of the oat straw, but it broke down early on in the demonstration. Still, I had the privilege and pleasure to see it poop out a couple of shiny yellow bales before it balked.

Grandpa had worked as a fireman on the railroad for a time when he and Grandma were living in Ohio. That’s from a period of time when working as a fireman could mean that you stayed nights in the firehall and put out burning buildings, or you were the poor cuss who had to shovel coal into the firebox of a steam driven locomotive. Grandpa had been that kind of fireman.

He had a lifelong interest in steam power and up until near the time that he died, had been working on a meticulously cast scale model of the engine he used to stoke. My sister and I visited my grandparents in ‘05, and Grandpa had it to the point where you could run it on compressed air, and he was starting to weld up the boiler for it. After Grandma’s cancer diagnosis, however, he ran out of time and energy for the project. My uncle Frank, who is an accomplished professional welder, has toyed with the notion of finishing Grandpa’s final, grandiose project. Uncle Frank was the beneficiary of Grandpa’s mantelpiece steam engine, a tiny air-driven model steam engine that sat in a plexiglas case the size of a shoebox and silently churned away atop Grandma & Grandpa’s fireplace in both the old San Jose house and up on the hill. He installed a hidden line off his garage air compressor for the express purpose of powering his miniature steam engine.

So as you can imagine, with that kind of background, knowledge, and interest, Grandpa was having a ball with the old farmers and gear-heads who were conducting the antique-tractor pull. He recognized some of the tractors as being similar to ones he had driven or that neighbors of his had owned in the past. Some were akin to the mechanized workhorses that trucked coal out of the mines in West Virginia. Others were completely new to him, but no less welcome than the old-and-familiar.

My grandparents visited once down here in Kansas City, in 2002, I do believe. It was at the apartment I lived in before I bought my old house, and I know I closed on the old house in April of ‘03. At any rate, my grandparents made it to KC for a visit and we visited a museum that I often take visitors to go and see; The Steamboat Arabia. If you’re not familar, it’s a showcase of goods salvaged from a sunken river-freighter that went down in 1856. Just about every kind of manufactured goods (and some raw materials) that would have been shipped out to the frontier back then was aboard the ship, and they have a broad and representative sampling of the minutia of daily living in 1856. Everything from roofing nails to perfume, canned fruit to workboots. It’s pretty fascinating to anybody who is at all interested in material culture, and my grandparents found it plenty entertaining. Once again, probably the highlight of Grandpa’s day out was when we came upon the hulk of the engine of that old paddlewheeler and he could get a look at what made the boat go. All of the antique tools, the well-preserved gumboots, and the mysterious vials of nostrum and snake-oil lost their luster next to the black, iron piston and boiler laid out behind a plexiglas barricade. Grandpa’s marvelous mechanical mind instantly began working out how the thing had run, what would have linked it up to the paddlewheels, what was present, and what was still lurking around somewhere beneath a century-and-a-half of silt. He shared his theory with one of the museum staff, who confirmed that Grandpa’s notion of how it had worked was very close to the truth.

Grandpa was the sort of fellow you sure could learn a lot from.

Just some little bits and pieces of thoughts of late:

• The other night when I was coming home from work, I had one of those absolutely glorious and magical rides that just makes you happy to be alive and pedalling.  It has been surprisingly cool and rainy lately and there’s quite a lot of marshy land along the river and in the bottoms.  Because the habitats are so ideal right now, there are a correspondent quantity of frogs gettin’ froggy wid’ it down along the river.  Pretty much from the Woodswether bridge until you hit the foot of Strawberry hill, there was a constant serenade of frog calls.  Besides the joyful noise of horny amphibians, it was just a really nice night.  Cool but not chilly, and since it’s been raining so much lately, the air just smelled clean and pleasantly grassy/earthy.
• Apropos of nothing, the other day a story popped into my head about one of my dad’s buddies in his young, single days.  Dad’s friend Doug was, at the time, a young man who had recently gotten his first place and was learning the ropes of householding.  He’d gotten himself a hell of a deal on a whole chicken at the grocery, but realized when he got home that he had no idea of how to prepare it.  So what did Doug do, who owned no cookbooks and who was batching it in the days before Google?  He called Information!  In those heady days of the late 1970s, not only did he get a live operator, he got one who was both bored and kindhearted enough to verbally walk him through the process of preparing his chicken!
• Joel’s getting the fever!  Trashboat Fever! He borrowed James’s kayak the other day and floated from Kaw Point to the Berkeley boat ramp and said that the water’s fine and fast. Ruby and I waited for him down at Berkeley with the truck and Miss Roo had a fine and mighty time digging in the riverside sand, sniffing new sniffable things, and randomly pee-ing on this and that. In short it was an ideal outing for a nosy young dog.
• Ruby’s “little” buddy Bagheera sprained his left-front paw and so right now neither of them can play together and it’s making both of them nuts. I hear him over there barking and grizzling because he’s got loads of puppy-energy and can’t run it off, and Ruby hears him whining and gets whipped up into her own ridiculous puppy-energy frenzy and is starting to drive me a little bit nuts. I had her fetching tonight which seems to have taken the edge off of her crazies, but only an edge
• Today was the ACME Saturday Ride, and it was a darn nice cruise. We got to roll past a very cool custom car show down in the West Bottoms. Wish I’d had a little more time to truly check out and appreciate the results of a lot of creativity, hard work, and investment, but I did get a few photos of some of the rides, so I’ll post those tomorrow
• I bought a highly offensive pair of “shoes” today for $2.98. Joel and I were checking out the thrift shops because he wanted to get a couple of more pair of dress pants to turn into shorts, and I’m trying to find another pair of barely-used Dr. Martens to replace the pair that Ruby ate (that was a serious bummer, and one of the few really obnoxious things that she’s ever done). I’d also been thinking about getting a pair of Crocs for wearing around the house, and now, for the lordly sum of just slightly less than three dollars, I have a pair of yellow-and-pink swirled Airwalk brand “crocs” for kickin’ around home. I have just treated them with a generous misting of bleach and expect that they will be fine lounging-around shoes. Slippers that can go into the garden. Good enough for me. I just have to keep ‘em out of Ruby’s reach, ’cause she really seems to relish the texture of Croc.

So yeah. That’s about it over here. Got another sewing project brewing, a couple of brewing projects in the planning stages, and an all-girls alleycat that I really need to get to crackin’ on. It’s a good gig, this kind of life.

I’m really bad about starting suits and taking forever to finish them. At least the suit you’re about to see didn’t take me almost four years to finish! It was only back in February when I started this one.

Ugh…the skirt looks like I cut it crooked in these photos because it barely fit over the skirt frame of my dummy and I obviously didn’t get it tugged into line, but I hope you’ll believe me that the plaid hangs straight when it’s on me, not my dress form.

This suit was frankly inspired by the 1998 Chanel line of “deconstructed” suits with fringey raw edges and a loose, informal silhouette. I was going for something a little more curvaceous than the standard Chanel cardigan suit and found it in the combination of Butterick B4863 (Option D) for the jacket and New Look 6541 (Option C) for the skirt. I modified the skirt pattern by shortening it about 3.5″ so that it hits just a bit below knee level rather than at the ungainly mid-calf, which is where this pattern lands as-drafted (though the envelope photo clearly shows a knee-length skirt). I’ve also made Option D from this pattern and found out the hard way that it ends up being longer than illustrated. I’m not in the petite range, so I believe that whoever made the skirt shown on the envelope didn’t follow the pattern as drafted.

Anyway, I’m pretty happy with how this suit turned out. My pattern matching turned out as well as can be expected, considering the bias-cut flounce. The plaid matches up along all of the vertical seams, and that’s about the best that can be achieved with this type of garment. The pattern is designed to be unlined, but given the loose weave of this boucle tweed, I interlined the suit throughout, excepting the flounces, just to reinforce the fabric and give it a little more structure and body.

I really like the shape (and fit) of this Butterick jacket pattern and have plans to make it up again in another fabric. It is great at insinuating curves that I don’t strictly posses. I’ll be changing the pattern up a little bit…I don’t like the collar for options A through C as designed with its weird little faux-notch, so I will be rounding that off into a more standard shawl collar.

This suit may be a little too giddy for interview wear, but for regular office wear, it will be quite a nice option.