Random Thoughts

A large chain of home-improvement stores with the initials HD is the very devil. They want fully one dollar more apiece for an eight-foot pressure treated 2x4 than a local discounted builders' supply. Bastards!

I regularly lock my doors when I am home alone in the daytime just in case a fugitive from the law tries to get in to get my car keys, fresh clothes, and money from me. Ain't happening here, buddy. Try the idiots down the street. Their kids will open the door to anybody.

We opened some (well known brand of interlocking plastic building block toys) for nephew Thomas to play with when he's here after kindergarten. We had bought some on sale for possible future holiday gifts. I became obsessed with sorting them and have built a smallish castle strictly for the sheer fun of it. And it was fun. I'm plotting the next project. We even opened the other container of them and combined them all for maximum buildage. They are sets of 400 basic blocks plus 300 "bonus" blocks which appear to be floor scrapings -- leftovers from very specialized kits. As evidence I offer forth the fact that there are what appear to be two "Han Solo frozen in carbonite" blocks from some variety of Star Wars toy. There are many interesting bits and pieces in there. Oh, to be a kid again... can you say that if you never grew up in the first place? Sure, I may look 38...

Delia is currently leafing through the collected works of Allen Ginsberg. So much for Richard Scarry. Frankly given the choice I'd go for the Scarry books, but there's no accounting for taste.

In tangible news, things are going well and there is hope for the future. Without hope we have nothing, as was pointed out to me at a work orientation the other day. I'm going back as an on-call for some cash money to throw at the credit card monsters, and the mental-health agency I work for makes you sit through all the garbage about mission statement and ethics and crap like that. I find it all a lot of earnest corporate mumbo-jumbo, and happily surfed the net (sanitized though it was with all the filtering etc) in my back row seat -- thank you, oh employment gods, for holding this orientation in a computer room! -- but did come away with one thing I felt was useful: part of the agency's mission is to provide hope, because without it there's no point. People with no hope are desperate and unhappy and tend to off themselves. This would be distinctly counter to the agency's objective, i.e. provide services to the mentally ill, since if the mentally ill all kill themselves we'd be out of a job.

Oh, and plus it would be a real shame to squander all that potential. I mean, some severely mentally ill individuals are excellent consumers of tobacco and coffee products. Seriously, the tobacco and coffee cartels should get in gear and start lobbying for more funding for these people. I've seen schizophrenic clients spend literally their last dime on cigarettes rather than have any for the niceties, such as, oh, socks and underwear, foot fungus remedies, antacids, a movie, lunch out at McDonalds.

But hey, let's not get started.

Must run, fence building materials to be purchased at the local discount supply store. :)