The Electric

Wednesday: - Sold bass and amp to Sam Ash. As Mike Doughty posted to his blog, instruments are meant to be played and loved. My bass was just gathering dust.

• Drove to Cleveland which took close to 5 hours thanks to traffic

• Brined the turkey

Thursday - Yanked the turkey out of the brine

• Looked over sale ads

• Cooked herb rubbed turkey along with helping Jean with the other items

• Dinner at the Shull’s

Friday - Ran up with Terry to Best Buy to get Studio 10 for the computer.

• Met Kathy and Mike for lunch at Ruby Tuesday’s

• Got a spindle of DVDs from CompUSA which then needed to be returned since they were not the ones on sale

• Returned Studio 10 to Best Buy since I didn’t qualify for the competitive rebate and got a spindle of DVDs which this time were on sale

• Had leftovers at the Shull’s

Saturday - Drove home with the Shull in time for the Gahanna Holiday Lights parade

Sunday - Went to Wildlights at the Columbus Zoo with the Shull’s

Monday - Shull’s head home after some shopping at Meijers

• Jean and I take John to see Chicken Little in 3D at the new Rave Motion Pictures @ Polaris.

Too many things in the hopper the last few weeks but here is a sampling of the fun stuff I was able to sneak in:

Books: We3: Interesting angle. Reminded me of the rat-thing segments from Snow Crash.

Batman War Games Vols 1-2: I’ve never liked the character of Robin. So a few of the subplots ring hollow but its got some interesting twists.

Games: Call of Duty 2: Messed with the pre-release demo on a Xbox 360 and on my new rig. Very hard for the untrained eye to tell the demos apart (both demos are from the El Daba mission). I’m already jonesing for the new 360 controller since it will work on both the 360 and my PC (thanks to the 360’s use of USB and the new XNA game developer toolkit)

TV: I got my AMD X2 to play nice with Windows Media Center Edition thanks to a patch from AMD that keeps both CPU cores from trying to handle the MCE video calls at the same time. I also got WinTv2000 working with my VCR so I’ve started the process of going thru my tons of video tapes, dubbing what I want to keep over to the PC for future burning to DVD and then chucking the tape. For the really valuable stuff, the master tape will be kept but 80% of them are hitting the curb.

Biggest Loser: Don’t know why I’m so hooked on this show since it makes me feel bad about finding the time to workout.

Cooking: In time for Thanksgiving, I’ve been messing with an herb paste turkey rub that I got from the good folks at Cook’s Illustrated. I used it at our church Thanksgiving and came out so well that Jean has me cooking it again for Thanksgiving itself. It’s a fun recipe plus it does make the turkey so yummy.

Ok, so the title is a bit naive but here’s my point. What you read here is about as close to a running chain of thought as I can get while staying in full sentences.

About 90% of the stuff is pure brain dumping of the get it off you’re chest variety. This dumping is spurred on by my counseling sessions as well as by folks who happen along and check me if I’m out of line or give me a shout out if we’re on the same page.

While I’m honest here, it’s not the whole picture and I never mean it to be. Mostly I use this to every now and then look to see where I’ve come from on a certain thing and to see just how it’s playing out. At times, I’m wrestling with 30 years worth of stuff that I stuffed inside because I either didn’t want to deal with it or it was just too tough to admit. So as I’ve been dealing with it, the near lava-ish flow sometimes spills out here. But like lava, it cools, forms into a mass, becomes soild and things can grow on it. That’s my goal, not to nuke anyone but to get stuff out so that it can cool rather than leave it burn in my gut.

Need to get since I’ve got email to get to..

Man, it’s been a crazy 6 weeks between trying to get the computer squared with Dell, the office rebuilt at home, waiting for the new rig to arrive plus finishing my business writing class.

You’d think I’d catch a bit of a break but the answering machine had a message that caused me to about flip.

It was my brother-in-law, the one I haven’t talked to since April 1, 2003 when he all but gutted me over the phone over a family dispute over money. The details of said dispute I won’t rehash.

Since that call, I’ve pretty much taken a ‘never want to see him again’ stance. Fear is part of it. The fear of getting drilled again since he knows what buttons to push on me (he lives with my Mom after all) mixed with the fear of not standing up for myself.

Yet here is the message. I couldn’t even play all of it. I paused it and waited for Jean to come home. My brother-in-law was asking if we could maybe get together, have dinner to try and mend fences.

First thing that hit my mind was “what the rub”? I know he’s a Decon now, maybe God’s hand is in this? Or is it what my gut is telling me, that there is an angle in play. A reach out because something is coming and my family wants to bring me back into their corner. I feel I’ve got to check my credit report just to be on the safe side.

The worse part of this is that I just wanted to be done with it all. I walked away for a reason. My brother-in-law wanted to be the man, well, be the frigging man. I don’t care. Just leave me alone. My roll as first born and family enforcer I willingly quit because I found it was the thing killing me.

So what to do? Jean’s take is to set the ground rules. - Sister and brother-in-law only - no issues between my Mom and myself on the table

If they want to talk under those connditions, then we might have something…

Why does anything envolving my family feels like a rejected Mafia subploit?