11:26 a.m. - 2007-08-25
Been a While, Huh?
Hey, look! This is my first entry in more than a month! That being the biggest lag between entries to date at Stevergo, since it began two years ago. Historic! Why the unusual lag, you may ask? No doubt the Stevergo team has been travelling to far-flung places doing research to provide compelling new content for the Stevergo page. Interviewing world leaders, chronicling the lives of people in exotic locales, riding animals like camels, elephants and alligators. That sort of thing. Or if not, perhaps the Stevergo team has been hard at work on some project or other, something involving supercolliders or bacteriology, something like that to help advance science and human knowledge? Or at least doing some reading? Or amateur astronomy? Or stamp collecting or pet grooming? Or, like, anything besides hanging around watching TV? HAS TEAM STEVERGO BEEN JUST SITTING ON ITS ASS THE LAST FIVE WEEKS, WATCHING TV? Have you even done, say, a little house work to justify your long, your TOO long, hiatus?
Fret not, Gentle Reader; the answer to your last frustrated query is yes! We at Stevergo have indeed done a little house work since the middle of July. Bathroom, kitchen, floors, the whole nine yards. It was a wild yet productive time. Mops were deployed, swiffers were used and discarded, cat vomit was scraped off of floors, walls and ceilings. And there was vacuuming, plus the clearing of clutter. Newspapers were placed in the recycling bin, along with various bottles, cans and possibly non-recyclable plastics. (This is a topic of some confusion for me. It turns out you're not supposed to put a lot of plastic containers in recycling, and yet practically every plastic container they make has the little recycling symbol on the bottom, with the three bendy arrows. I had always assumed that the symbol was a license, nay, a COMMAND to chuck it in recycling. This is not the case. There are numbers involved, on top of the symbol. No one knows what any of the numbers mean. All these years I've been tossing all the wrong things in recycling, slowing progress and wasting your tax dollars. Shame!) Our drudgery was motivated by a family visit: my father (Tom) and his wife, Jo, plus young Jon and Nolan, both fifteen. They came to town for a couple of days, and it was nice seeing them. Ironically, after all the cleaning, they almost didn't even see our house, since they weren't staying with us and all. In fact they only stopped by after I spent two days badgering them to come over and look at our new living room ceiling, which now that I think about it, I don't think anyone has seen yet except Barb and now my dad and Jo and the fifteen year olds. And we finished it like seven weeks ago. That's how unpopular we are; we have to dragoon and guilt relatives into looking at our handiwork while no one else will.
Meanwhile, summer wore on like always with the standard summer rigmorale of crushing heat and inane events like Cucumber Week and The Great American Midwestern Summer Sweat-Off. There were outdoor concerts. Yid Vicious went up north to Marquette, MI to play at an olde tyme music festival. Camping on the festival grounds, we ran afoul of a coven of angry, hatchet-faced she-trolls with overly developed territorial insticts and a penchant for loud talking around the clock. We survived a long night in their midst, but not before they pushed Melissa--kind, gentle Melissa--to the breaking point, at which point she went off on our tormentors in a decisive manner. Lesson: Don't make Melissa mad. (Interestingly, I nearly slept through this whole episode. I'm never able to sleep while camping, but on this trip I seem to have unlocked the secret: wine in a box. This irritated Kia to no end, since, for once, she was the one who couldn't sleep. Strange things can happen in the north.) Other than that unpleasantness, and the harrowing worry inspired by an absent band member who had disappeared without a trace days prior to the festival, it was a good time. My mom (Claudia) plus her husband Jim, my brother Pat and his wife Pam had come up north to see us, and also Barb and other Jim were there, so we got some family time in. Our sets seemed to go well and, since we were in proximity to Lake Superior, we did Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (see previous post). The legend lives on, baby.
Oh, and I got to help record music to accompany a vomit scene in an independent film. See, Gentle Reader? I HAVE been making positive contributions to society these past weeks.
