Doc’s Blog

So, I get a message from my youngest daughter (whom I don’t have much contact with):

"did your sister from Los Angeles ever get ahold of you to tell you about your brother?"

I write back and say "no." and get:

ok – so this might sound as crazy to you now as it did me at the time and you should know.

< ?xml:namespace prefix = o />About 2 1/2 – 3 years ago i get a call out of the blue from a Hispanic lady down in LA. At the time, the phone was in Stans name when he lived with me. She said she was looking for her long lost brother Stan King. I said my brothers name is Stan King and she said he would be in his fifties and so i told her my dad’s name is Stan King. She asked if you’re brothers names were Anthony and George and I said i think so and then she flipped out happy. She said she was your sister. From what I thought, i thought your sister had passed away at a young age right? I told her she couldnt be your sister.

She said she was the offspring resulting from an affair that your father had. Here’s the weird part. She said that he had an affair with her Hispanic mother and shortly after joined the KKK and booted her mother and their children out of town so no one would find out he had Mexican kids and she never saw him since. She wanted to get ahold of you to let you know that your brother had passed away. Please forgive me because I don’t remember which one she was talking about and I didnt keep her name or number because i was a little freaked out. I don’t know if she said George or maybe one of her siblings. I’m sorry, i don’t remember but i thought you should know and you can investigate if you’d like.

So, it’s Internet Search Time! And guess what? After several misdirections I Found My Little Sister Mina! Too cool. Of course, I didn’t know that until she called me back after leaving a couple dozen messages at different Mina’s. I’d swear the last time I saw her was when she was 6 but she claims I saw her when she was about 18. I have absolutely no remembrance of that. She just turned 45 (she can’t be that old!) and has almost half a dozen kids of her own. Cool!

So, we talked for a couple of hours getting caught up. Turns out my brother Tommy died about 3 years ago from medical complications and/or Epilepsy. I can’t really miss him any more than I already have as I haven’t seen nor heard from him in about 10 years. Sorry he’s gone but there’s not much I can do about it.

Now to try to find my brother George. Haven’t seen him since 88 and haven’t heard from him at all since 92 when our Mom died. Last I heard he was living down Denver, Colorado way…

Bill Clinton is getting $12 million for his memoirs. Hillary got $8 million for hers.
That’s $20 million for the memories from two people, who for eight years repeatedly testified, under oath, that they couldn’t remember anything.

So, where we off to next? I supposed I could do the "update" thingie except that I really haven’t been doing that much. Had a nice couple of days, weatherwise, so I, naturally, went to the property and moved dirt. Have about 1/4th the crawl space emptied out. Cool! I just love being out at the property.

Or I could tell you how I laid around mostly yesterday sleeping cause I woke up feeling like warmed over cow puke; but you probably wouldn’t be interested.

Had a meeting with one of the contractors today and we managed to cut almost $50k out of the house budget. Won’t get to put in the radiant heating and will have to change the materials in the wall between the ’house’ and the "shop" but I can live with both decisions. Oh, we’ll have to put a regular roof up also instead of the metal one; but SWMBO can worry about replacing it with my insurance money when I kick off. I really want to get this house built!

Just not much going on. SWMBO took me to FodGathers for pizza (I had the all you can eat salad bar and stole a slice of her pizza) then we walked through the junk store next door and Ace Hardware. Thinking about getting a laser level thingie.

One of my brother-in-laws called last night wanting to talk to his sister but wound up talking to me for a couple of hours last night. (SWMBO was off to the office like she does most Wednesdays.) I wound up buying him a web site (www.rmsproductions.biz) so maybe he can make some money selling his 3d Max render stuff. Hey, if it doesn’t work I’m out a whole $45 for the year! Hope he gets it going. I put up a temporary site for him…

The "Great Experiment" seems to be going okay still. I do miss the morning news. Kinda. Been watching CSI and CSI Miami (on dvd) a lot. I supposed I could get off my lazy fat ass and put up a small antenna and watch the morning news; but Seattle may still switch over this month to digital transmissions anyway and I don’t have the converter box nor a digital receiver on my tv. Oh well.

Me & My Ma. About 1954

Let’s see. I don’t believe anything else of non-importance has happened around here. Did I remember to say that I found homes for both of the puppies? Did. They gone. Switched over from Vonage to the MagicJack and that seems to be working well.

No headlines tonight. Busy doing other things.

Back when I first wanted to get a cd recorder (around 1993 if I remember right. But may have been earlier.):

SUBJECT:CD-Recorders, Philips Lower Price. Don’t be fooled by others who say they have a lower price!!!

These prices include Corel CD-Creator software and Adaptec Controller for your PC!!

Philips CDD 522, $2,499.00

Smart & Friendly CD-R 1002 High Performance At a lower cost, single and double speed recording, Supports red book audio, Record a disc in as little as 37 minutes 1MB buffer, $1,549.00

Smart & Friendly CD-R 2000 Dual to meet any need, Single and double speed recording, Record a disc in as little as 37 minutes, Daisychain up to 6 together for simultaneous copies on all of them!, Unattended copy mode, Supports red book audio, Buffer expandable from 2MB to 32MB!! $2,499.00

CD-R 4000 For those who need warp speed, Single, Double, and QUAD speed recording! Record a disc in as little as 17 minutes, supports Red book audio, 512KB buffer. $3,599.00

CD-R Media, 74 minute CD’s when purchased with the CD-R 2000, as many as 1,000 pieces, only $7.50!! (EACH!)

CD-R Media as follows with other purchases:
63 Minute 74 minute
10+ $9.50 ea. 10+ $9.75 ea.
100+ $9.00 ea. 100+ $9.30 ea.
1000+ $8.45 ea. 1000+ $8.70 ea.

For the above CD-Recorders with Gear Windows add $360.00

For the above CD-Recorders with Macromedia Director, Authorware W.M.,
and Gear WIN MM, add $1,000.00

My first cd recorder was an external that was about as big as a 90’s vcr, recorded at 1 speed (which took about an hour per cd) and you absolutely could not do anything else while burning or you’d wind up with an expensive coaster. I seem to remember it costing around $300. The only reason I was able to afford it was I had sold 100 copies of a Medical Tickler Management System I wrote to the US Navy for evaluation and made enough to buy the thing. (The Navy never did contact me about buying more. Bummer!)

Going out to the property and pushing over trees and stacking them. Haven’t too many left to do and I’m done! Cool!

Last:

Tuesday & Wednesday: Spent most of the days out at the property moving logs from the clearing down to the bottom of the hill. Time consuming as my digger can drag only so much..Wednesday SWMBO went in to her office as usual.

Thursday: More of the same. Pushed over a couple more trees and got them to the clearing and stacked.

Do my days seem pretty much SSDD? I know I post "Spent the day pushing over trees" a lot but you gotta realize that I have a MINI-excavator and it can take over an hour (or more) to dig out one side of a tree (especially if it’s a fairly good size), push it over, get the rootball completely dug up and pulling it up to the clearing and stacked. Most times the trees are heavy enough that I have to back my digger up 6-8 feet, grab somewhere on the root and pull the tree to me. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat until I get it to where I’m going to stack it. That can take awhile!

Friday: SWMBO and I went to the theater in Gig Harbor for the 1030 showing of "The Dark Knight." Too bad it started at 1000! Damn! So we went to the bookstore in that shopping complex and a "foo-foo" Pizza place. Pizza tasted okay BUT… It was too expensive for what we got. Got home and then it was back out to the property for me.

Saturday: Was more of the same. About the only thing I can say is nearly every day was DAMN FINE HOT & SUNNY!!! I really enjoyed it! You should hear the people up here bitch about the "heat wave." You’d think God was purposely trying to melt them into little puddles or something.

Today: Pretty much more of the same for me. Didn’t go to church as they’re having conference and SWMBO would have had to sit with the Choir anyway. So I went on out to the property and got to work. SWMBO was supposed to be there about 1400 with the makings for dinner. She showed about 1500 or so. Grilled us steaks! They was good! Heard some thunder (and thought I saw a flash of lightning once) and it got real windy (and I got sprinkled on a couple of times) but it was still nice up there. Especially with SWMBO there!

Yesterday & today there were a couple of old looking planes up dogfighting with each other somewhat over the property. But not shooting bullets, of course. But it was kind of neat watching them zoom around trying to get on each other’s tails. Saw a formation of military jets go by also.

Upward Bound 1970-Tim Howard and Trini Pineda

There’s just not much going on, folks. I’m so busy trying to get as much done ’pre-construction’ at the property that I’m not doing much of anything else. Even ’housework’ gets put on the back burner. In the evenings I ’play’ on my computer and listen to the tv or convert videos and listen to the tv until around bedtime. Then I read an hour or so and go to sleep and repeat the whole thing the next day. Not exciting to the vast majority of y’all, I know. But that is real life.