From June of 2005 when we were younger and Herschel was alive in Normal entries

I played with my daughter and grandwhelp yesterday, he’s such a funny little thing. We decided to meet at movie madness because it’s so dang close to her new pad and then we were going to go wandering Laurelhurst Park. This park was in the papers for a while; I think it even made the wire as a national story. Dogs were getting poisoned in this park.

Not loose and feral dogs, no, dogs on the end of leashes going for happy little walks through the happy little park with the happy geese and ducks and happy little winos. I don’t know if they ever discovered how (for instance I’d know if Herschel was eating something off the ground in a park, no one mentioned their dogs doing as such). But it was a big deal. I didn’t bring Hersch on the excursion.

Spud spazzed at bit in the movie store, not because her little monkey kept running between her and me in a crowded store, but because I was offering a suggestion in front of an employee. All the kids’ movies she wanted were vhs and she only had a DVD player, so I was suggesting we go to my house and she started shushing me and pointing at the employee right behind me stacking shelves. I guess she thought I was going to say “Let’s go to my house Spud R Dawg of 1122 boogie woogie avenue, blood type b+, social security # 001-555-0001, and we can do some gross violation of copyright laws, an unnatural act against the US government and God himself.”

I simply said; let’s watch them on my vcr. She stopped waving her arms and spazzing and said oh, and then whispered ‘yeah, but we can copy them too right?’ We shouldn’t have met there, I had a few bucks burning a hole in my pocket, and they charge a buck a pop for the employee’s picks; Black Orpheus, Eight and a half women, and a knife in the water (a collection of Early Roman Polanski shorts). Oh well, fi-diddly-dee a pirates life for me.

Then we wandered up the street to the slowly gentrifying bohemian district for a plate of hippie nachos. The nachos were good, the sky was darkening, and the littlest of our lot was nodding. So we skipped the dog killing park and serpentined the back streets to the Manse du Dawg.

George Lucas invented an encoding for video tapes to keep them from being pirated. If I gave a shit I could remember the name and how it’s done (I think it’s a frequency on a separate channel, but I don’t remember). Ever since it was invented a piece of hardware was invented that’ll filter it out. The encoding works for DVD players as well as vcrs, it’s on the tape.

Outside of George Lucas films (all of which can now be found on dvd which has no such encoding, and what encoding it does have there are slicker ways around) I had never run into any tape with the encoding. Until Yesterday. Blues Clues. That blue bastard.

Charlie “bang-bang” Brown recorded just fine as did Horton hears a Whom, but blues clues was a wash. I think I’ll pick up some kids things at blockbuster for the wee waif, though his mother the spud is pretty particular about what he watches.

Herschel was all kinds of excited to see us and had a hard time getting it into his head that there was something little just laying in the bed, not doing nothing, that really wanted his company and yet for some inexplicable reason the door was closed. Usually the only time that door is closed is when daddy is making mommy scream and doesn’t want him protecting, but eventually the door opens and everyone smells funny.

I sent them packing when the tater tot woke; ice cream and good will were on their agenda. A new ice cream place opened up the street, the Creamery or Dreamery, something like that, all hand made stuff on the premises, pretty good, and a pretty process to watch.

Sunny was to come over later in the day but found herself enmeshed in teenage crisis. I’d get into it, but I don’t want to. I frittered and wasted the evening watching things on the idiot box, it probably would have been healthier to have fretted and strutted my hour on the stage, but that’s like work. On the big rock candy mountain they killed the Turk that invented work.