So my father has proposed a fun Thanksgiving weekend activity for the family during their visit here… putting in a concrete floor for an addition to the house.

My dad, when I was a wee one and my mother was pregnant with my brother, built a house. He just found a book on how to build a house, and built one. It was an a-frame, and to his knowledge it still stands. He has a bit of credibilty, though I’ve never seen the house in question.

The idea of hauling in 10 tons of gravel and mixing up a slab’s worth of concrete doesn’t seem like a big deal to him. To me, it sounds like a recipe for trouble. But I’m going to put my trust in the man and do the legwork to make this thing happen. Worse case, I figure we waste a vacation and end up with a misshapen concrete blob behind the house.

To that end, does anyone know a good source for 10 tons of gravel?

We’re back.

What’d I miss?

This is what I did.

I’m a big fan of Carol Lay’s WayLay comic.

But I just don’t get the recent storyline at all.

I didn’t know it until yesterday, but Susan Buffett died last month.

http://money.cnn.com/2004/07/29/news/newsmakers/susanbuffett_obit/

She was an interesting woman, as I guess you’d have to be to be married to Warren. Susan was Warren’s sister’s roommate at Northwestern. She had wanted to marry someone else, but Warren convinced her father that he was the better man for her. She was jewish, and had wanted to marry a gentile. Warren, while not jewish, told her father “I’m jewish enough for you, and christian enough for her.”

In 1977, after her 3 kids were grown and out of the house, she told Warren she was moving to San Francisco to pursue a music career. She set Warren up on several dates to help him find a woman to take her place. They didn’t divorce or anything, just sort of went their separate ways but visited from time to time. Astrid Menks, the woman who eventually ended up living with Warren was quoted as saying “Living with Warren is the best job I ever had.”

At every annual meeting, you would see Susan and Astrid sitting next to each other chatting amiably.

If she had survived Warren, she would have become the second richest person in the United States, after Bill Gates.

She was a fierce social advocate, working on behalf of people with AIDS and other causes.

Not a wasted life, I don’t think.

There was an interview with Rod, the gay character from Broadway’s Avenue Q, on NPR this morning.

He was crying discrimination because the GOP convention organizers were not offering discounts to Avenue Q, which, according to the Tonys, was the Best Book, Best Score and Best Musical of 2004.

Rod: “I guess they can’t handle naked puppet-on-puppet action.”

The interviewer reminded Rod that they had gotten discounts to see another show with naked puppets, The Lion King.

Rod: “What?! That’s it. I’m calling Dick Cheney. Dick! Get ready, ’cause I’m calling you!”

Heh, heh, heh.

There are few things as depressing to me than coming around the curve on Spaghetti Junction and seeing a vast parking lot on 285 westbound all the way to the horizon.

*sigh*

On the positive side, I got to observe, for a looong time, in my rearview mirror, a juxtaposition of roles.

There was a youngish woman with short cropped, bleach blond hair in a Dodge Ram pickup truck. In the passenger seat was a young boy whose eyes were just above the dash, kilroy-fashion.

The mom was hyper-kinetic. She was smoking a cigarette, bouncing in her seat (not dancing, I don’t think… just bouncing), adjusting her mirror, reaching across to roll up and down the window, tapping her cigarette out her own window, adjusting the radio.

Meanwhile, the smallish boy sat passively staring straight ahead, not reacting at all.

I don’t know what it means, but I couldn’t stop watching.

Are there more bumper stickers on cars now then there were in recent previous decades?

I remember, as a child, complaining to my dad that there were all these cool bumper stickers available (“I’m going crazy, want to come along?”), and we didn’t have a single one on our cars. To date, my parents have never had a bumper sticker on any of their cars.

But I also seem to remember that bumper stickers were rare things. I may be wrong.

Somebody do a survey, okay? I’ll be here when you’re done.

My boss sent me an email to let me know he’d requested the IT department to move me from my cube to the new office (they have to change the phone extension and move my computer. Admittedly, it’s a laptop, but they’re picky about keeping track of where computers are.)

I responded to his email with the following:

Well we’re movin on up,
To the east side.
To a deluxe apartment in the sky.
Movin on up,
To the east side.
We finally got a piece of the pie.

Well we’re movin on up,
To the east side.
To a deluxe apartment in the sky.
Movin on up,
To the east side.
We finally got a piece of the pie.

He responded, “Thank you, Mr. Jefferson.”

I’ve been trying to figure out why I haven’t gotten a single email on my personal account all day. Not even SPAM!

Then I remembered I converted my home system over to Mozilla Thunderbird last night. I believe I left it running and forgot to disable auto-mail-downloading. So, don’t send me anything important, I won’t get it until tonight.

It makes me paranoid, not knowing what emails might be coming in. It’s irrational, but addiction is addiction.

Plus, I never know when a comment’s been posted, ‘less I check that newfangled comment page LJ set up.

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On a side, techie note, does anyone use Thunderbird, and if so, have you figured out how to make the comment reply forms in the emails work?