Rated ‘D’ for Democracy

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I spent the week dealing with a flea infestation as well as preparing for this weekend’s parental infestation. The parents really have not been that bad and Kim has been around quite often for support. Some random notes about the weekend:

  • My dad was not doing so well when I saw him in December, but is much worse off now. The combination of Parkinson’s and assorted back problems and neck surgeries seem to be taking their toll. He now has to use a cane, and while they brought up a wheelchair it did not seem to be necessary. He has shrunk by about a foot and has some serious grey hair. On a more silly note, he had to shave his beard recently because of surgery-related stuff, but kept a mustache–specifically, it looks like a biker mustache, similar to the one Harry Shearer has on Spinal Tap.
  • The Sheraton Four Points hotel seems like a decent place from the outside. Do not let this deceive you. The hotel restaurant has horrible, as well as slow, service. (I found a sheet of plastic in my lasagna.) The toilets do not work terribly well. The soda and ice machines on my parents floor, the third, were out–as well as THE ELEVATOR! The elevator was fixed after a while, but not before the old guy with the cane had to traverse three flights of stairs.
  • McMenamin’s Edgefield kicks some major ass. It is an old farm from nineteen-oh-something that was later converted into a sort of European village (I am not a number!) It is now a hotel, pub, movie theater, fancy restaurant, casual restaurant, winery, distillery, brewery, ball room, golf course, and has some of the trippiest (while remaining good) artwork around. This is where I discovered antelope is indistinguishable from pot roast (at least by me–who has never had the former and last had the latter about ten years ago). The Terminator Stout Chocolate Cake is damn fine.
  • Large amounts of rich food make for uneasy rest and strange, if not bad, dreams.
  • Beer milkshakes are not available at the local McMenamin’s (the Barleymill)
  • I now have a good managed switch that lets me better isolate the house’s internal network from the box on the internet and some new wireless gear. On a related note, I am also now a PersonalTelco node. I just wonder how many people, besides my friends, might actually use it.
  • I keep wondering where the Lemony Snicket books were when I was a kid, and end up repeatedly looking at the copyright date, never quite grasping that they were written when I was 25.

    If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle. This is because not many happy things happened in the lives of the three Baudelaire youngsters. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire were intelligent children, and they were charming, and resourceful, and had pleasant facial features, but they were extremely unlucky, and most everything that happened to them was rife with misfortune, misery, and despair. I’m sorry to tell you this, but that is how the story goes…

Yep, so that has been my week/weekend. I am sure I left some stuff off–both intentionally and accidentally–but am unsure what the accidental stuff may be.

Posted in: Books Dear Diary Portland

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