I mowed, edged and trimmed the lawn last evening, so that's out of the way, and caught up my laundry. Have a major grocery shopping trip on tap for today - major meaning I buy bulk canned soda which my brother likes, dog food for the mutt, cleaning products, toiletries, paper products, plus all the usual groceries. Takes a couple hours, start to finish, usually.

I need to do some work on my Dad's old car, which I've hung on to for sentimental reasons, and put some money into last year to fix the air-conditioning. A motor mount is worn, and will be a pain to change, if it's even something I want to tackle myself. But it needs a tune-up, too, and this I can do myself. So, off to the auto parts store later.

Sunday, we need to go out and attack the yard at our inland place. Haven't mowed up there for 3 weeks, and it'll be knee high. Also, check hurricane supplies, and run the generator.

I am a contract employee working out of my home office so I don't really have clearly-defined days off. This weekend I have to layout all of the photos to finish a 500+ page book. I absolutely have to have everything wrapped up this coming week because . . .

ROADTRIP!!! I'm going on my first (and probably last) family roadtrip with my parents since I was a kid (over twenty years ago). I'm heading south to their house near Seattle and we'll be driving all over the western U.S. with multiple friend & family stops on the itinerary.

The only disappointment is that my best friend in Portland just moved to England, so I have no good excuse to spend a day there. I was looking forward to browsing Powell's, too.

paulsc, when you say your inland place, do you mean your regular place is on the shore? Do you have an ocean view?

I didn't have a direct sea view in Thessaloniki, but by standing at the very front of the balcony and looking left... there was the sea! (and just a few blocks away, to walk to.) I really, really miss seeing it every day.

ah. My weekend: cocooning. It's something over 100F in the shade right now, and I can't tell what it is in the sun, because when I put my thermometer in a sunny spot outside, it totally freaks out, and goes off the charts.

But I must say, I'm really impressed with this house - at least the our-apartment part of the house (we have the highest ceilings, I know that). Despite getting fierce western exposure, it's really, really fine. High ceilings, thick walls, and so far (in the hottest June weather in 20 years) I can be comfortable all day with just a fan; around 7 p.m., like clockwork, it begins feeling really hot from the soaked up heat, but I can use the AC then for just a couple of hours. Pretty nice. Definitely the coolest (temperature-wise) house of the five I've lived in here in Greece. Or, probably anywhere.

I've been seeing an acting coach who also coaches people on giving presentations and am just back from spending 1.5 hours in our local theatre doing relaxation, breathing, pronunciation and other exercises on the stage whilst trying to project to 300 empty seats. It's really good and makes me want to take up yoga.

What else? Well, it's my mum's birthday tomorrow so the family are down so I'll be mostly playing with my niece today and tomorrow. Hopefully outside. but the weather's fairly crappy, so that might not happen.

The building my flat is in needs a whole new roof. I initially was bracing myself for a £2000 bill as my share but, if today's news is anything to go by, it's actually going to be £5,000 or there abouts. Shit.

I am gonna go tell Gordon Brown he's a war-mongerin' coward.

I am going to Slidell, MS, on Monday for work and I am preparing feverishly for it. Or so it seems. It is exciting because I have not been to the Florida panhandle (one of my favoritest places on earth) for a while and since I managed to replace my driving license I can actually drive around a bit - if they'll let me have any spare time, that is.

At the same time (by Monday - deadlines never come one by one) I have to write a text of 5000 words. Uh, on the same topic. Uh, in a reader-friendly format and tone. I desperately need an editor. A mind-reader would be much more effective though. Ugh. I need a drink. Or 5000.

Uh, Slidell LA not MS. Good luck driving.

SLIdell is in a Lucinda Williams song. . .*smile*

I am working on this front deck. House projects are hard in that you can't do an 8 hour shift, because life gets in the way.

Other than that, getting ready to take Daughter up to rock and roll camp tomorrow. Turns out that I am her guitar tech.

It's a bit over a week before Kona. This has been a pretty stressful trip prep because of health issues but everything seems on track. I have actually found myself regretting having the tickets but I am sure I'll love it once there. Have a 3 hour layover in HNL and a co worker who lived there says take a cab to waikiki and eat at Dukes. Wife is cool to the idea, wants to stay at the airport, just in case. We'll see.

There is one artichoke that is slightly past ready in the garden. Its suffering will end tonight.

"paulsc, when you say your inland place, do you mean your regular place is on the shore? Do you have an ocean view?"

An ocean view in hurricane territory isn't all you'd think it would be, taz. :-) It's nice to have a barrier island between you and the ocean when the big winds blow.

Actually, my house is 3 blocks inland from the Intercoastal Waterway. Crossing the IW by bridge, I'm 7 minutes from "the beach," which, here in Jacksonville, consists of the cities of Atlantic Beach, Neptune Beach, and Jacksonville Beach. But since Duval County is one big incorporated metro area with all the cities and towns it contains, the only sense of the existence of "The Beaches," as those 3 towns are known, is the signs they put up all over, and the marketing they do on the 5 police cars they still maintain. Anything major happens, Duval County fire and rescue rolls out there, and you borrow books from Jacksonville Library branches out there.

On this map, my house is about where the "10" highway marker is, just west of Neptune Beach. 10 is actually the divding line between Atlantic Beach and Neptune Beach, so I can drive to the end of 10, park in front of a coffee shop, grab a mocha latte and be on the beach, with my mutt, 7 minutes after leaving home. I can even take a city bus to the beach, every half hour on weekdays. I get all the ocean views I want, any time I want.

You can see I really live on a low lying bit of what once was salty marsh land, before the drainage canals and pumping stations made it habitable. This one time salt marsh is actually a peninsula formed by the arc of the north and easterly flowing St. Johns River as it meets the ocean, whose delta you see on the linked map as a clutch of dozens of small islands to the north and east of me. Up there, about 5 miles from me, is the fishing port of Mayport, and another Naval Base (we have a couple of Navy bases here in Jax). Plenty of good fishing around here.

My inland place is 13 miles south of Folkston, GA, where this wildfire has been the big news the last couple of months. On the linked map above, it would be northwest of Jacksonville, off the map, through the town of Callahan (on highways 1 & 23 which run together as Kings Highway), about another 11 miles.

TMI?

heh danf, I found the lyrics of this song. Sounds a little monotonous but it might be fun. I'll look for it before I go! Yep, people's accent there is a-mazing (all people's regardless of race). Not in New Orleans really, but in MS and LA coast, oooh, boy. Actually I think it is kind of cute accent.

I will be cogitating over last night's brilliant conversation, sleeping, and finalising my mix (or at trying to.)

Most of the work I couldve saved for the weekend is done. I had a massive spring-clean of my flat through the week, scrubbing in places i didnt even know existed. There's some still to be done, and i'm no way done with the worst of it (oven-cleaning for example), but at least all the crap i've written over the last 15 years is now housed instead of being scattered to the four winds. Now comes the thrill/drudge of looking back at it all and finding 1) what an idiot i used to be and 2) finding those little nuggets of wisdom i left for my older self.

One of which was a copy of Max Ehrmann's "Desiderata", which pacified me when i was younger and, now, I realised i've been following for quite some time.

TMI?

Not at all. We already know that when the time comes for the revolution/armageddon/end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it that we're all turning up at your place, seeing as you're the only person who'll be even halfway prepared.

So some driving directions would be nice.

Paulsc wrote: TMI?

Never.

Today: start sorting through the dozens and dozens of pics we took on our camping trip earlier this week and start uploading them to Flickr. (This includes scanning the film pics- I took seven rolls. Ack.)

Tomorrow- get a badly-needed haircut.

I'm supposed to go to a good bye party for a friend of mine who's moving to DC in two hours and I'm trying to figure out a way to wiggle out of it because I really just want to keep puttering around the house, which is what I've been doing all day. It's a potluck too which means I'd have to go to the store like right now and make some kind of quick dish, argh, and I won't know most of the people there and they'll ALL be local dem party bigwigs which means they'll nurse one beer all night and talk seriously about politics and I just don't feel like going.

Meanwhile, the computer gave me a scare - refused to boot with one of those Failure to Boot Insert System Disc messages and I was like, oh fuck, but then I let it sit for an hour and it's working again. Joy.

Tomorrow I'm going up to see my friend in Bat Cave and we're going to go explore the tourist mecca that is Lake Lure, NC and take pictures of tackiness and I'm looking forward to that.

Not TMI, paulsc. I like all the details.

And pix.

It's a family weekend. Tonight I am having dinner at my mom's. Only mom won't be there and I'll be dining with her husband which is always weird dynamics because he doesn't really like me and I don't really like him but we are nice to each other because we both like my mom.

Tomorrow is more family crap. My dad's wife's kids and their kids will be here. This is always weird dynamics, too. When my dad remarried - his wife never made any solid attempts to make a cohesive family unit with us. Fast forward to 25 years later and now it's a situation where my brother and I treat her better than her own damn kids. Not because we like her but because it's the right effing thing to do. My dad's wife's way of dealing with any kind of crisis situation is to not deal with it at all and/or to be MEAN. Since I always think you get the true measure of a person in stress situations - well her true colors just SUCK. A very current situation is that my sixteen year-old niece is pregnant (niece is stepmom's grand daughter) - and nobody in the family is doing anything resembling reality on how to deal with that situation. It's going to be the elephant in the room tomorrow and I'm probably going to be the only one in the room able to deal with it without being a complete shithead. (The sixteen year-old is dealing with it more than her family - but she's dealing with it by eating dreamsicles about how the situation will turn out...I don't think anyone has given her advice in any way resembling the reality and levity of the situation.)

Stepmom's son is up from Texas with his wife and their four kids...this is why the get together is taking place. This group comes up once every couple of years and expects my dad to play happy grandpa time with kids he knows jack shit about and that he doesn't otherwise have any relationship with. (Dad happily does the grandpa bit for the pregnant girl and her brother...because HE SEES THEM ALL THE TIME TIME AND KNOWS THEM.) On top of the texas bunch another daughter of stepmom will also be here...this daughter is local but is a complete shithead that still blames her mother for all her problems in life. (This woman is 45 years old and needs to grow the eff up.) It's always stressful when this daughter comes around because she always has some drama going on or she starts drama when she's here.

Another daughter will also be here - she recently moved back to these parts from Alaska because she has breast cancer. I like this girl but have never had much of a relationship with her because she's older and was off in high school and then college when I was little. She's the free spirit of the bunch and always moved around a lot. I like her but just don't know her that well.

(Stepmom has four children. My use of the phrase "another daughter" might have confused the issue...there are 3 daughters + 1 son + me + my brother.) Out of the four I have an on-going relationship with one daughter + her kids (the pregnant niece is one of those kids)...this is probably because I actually grew up with her as she's only a couple years older than me. (The two other stepsisters are 8-10 years older than I am.) I also grew up with the stepbrother but he's pretty much always been an ass.

I am also doing a buttload of work for one of the comedians I work for this weekend. hahaha.

I'm driving to St. Louis to go to the showing of Serenity (cuz' it's Joss Whedon's B-Day!) woot!

Then I'm driving back to Columbia to work, then Wiffle! Then another installment of Book Club For Assholes...the bookclub with no books...

At MoCCA w/my peeps both days + played a Rock show last night (which is why I'm a little late to MoCCA today).

And, I saw Mrs. Pants a MoCCA and bought one of her books. It's incredible, of course, she's way too modest. I didn't say directly say who I was, but I tried to tip the hat with a sly signal, I don't think it worked.