Ain't Life Grand: Tent Cities

This week, one of the main event preparations I had to make was getting the tent seams sealed for the season. This involves actually setting the tent up. Colin was all over that. So were all his friends, and before long, so were all THEIR friends. At one point we had over a dozen kids buzzing around the house, poking in and out of tents and playing fortress games.

It reminded me of when I was a kiddo and my parents would let us set things up like that in the yards or basement. So much fun - I think that's part of the reason I love camping. He was having so much fun, I almost didn't want to pull him away for dinner. Anyway, just before running back outside after dinner to rejoin the fray, he looked at me and his mother and said "This has got to be one of the best days of my life!"

Ain't life grand?

Know Your Meme: Amber Lamps

Today at work, I recieved a phone call from a very distressed customer. You see, there were blinking lights on their email server. Blinking lights, kids, and yellow ones, at that. I asked her if she, or anyone else for that matter, was experiencing any issues with email delivery. She told me she hadn't noticed anything wrong, but those lights sure were blinking.

Blinking yellow lights, folks...

After due diligence, I found there was nothing wrong with the server beside being as old as God. I was, unfortunately, unable to troubleshoot the color of the lights on the server remotely. >.>; Sarcasm aside, I had to create a ticket to check out the server, since I had spent time on it. I decided to have some fun with it, and in the subject light, entered "Amber Lamps on server."

In case that link is a teal deer for you, let me break it down for you. Amber Lamps is a spin-off from the viral video from early this year dubbed Epic Beard Man. In the video, a "fist fight" breaks out on a metro bus between a black man and an older white man (who happens to have a rather gnarly beard) over some alleged racial something-or-other. The video starts just shy of a minute or so before the actual fight, so you never actually see or hear the beginning of the initial argument. And I use "fist fight" loosely; the black man threw the first punch and then was pummeled to a paste by the older man.

Over the course of this entire episode, there are many people yelling and hollering, shuffling around and egging on the two men to fight. There is, however, one lone figure who simply sat and watched the whole act play out, listening to her music on giant headphones, a genuine look of complete disinterest in the beat down happening mere feet from her.

The older man was escorted off the bus as the other limped back to his seat. When asked if he needed any help, he replied he might need an ambulance. It is this statement that is the cause for the spin-off. You see, his reply was rather unintelligible, likely from the injuries he took, and it sounds like he's calling for Amber Lamps. As you can imagine, the interwebs instantly caught that and ran with it, eventually turning it into a moniker for the cool-headed chick in the headphones.

Weekend Intelligence: A One Car Garage

Inertia is rough: it's one thing to want to do something, but making all the preparations to actually get that something to happen is a completely different matter. While the outdoorsy bug has bitten, there are a lot of things that have to be done to make it possible to go on a trip. All things that I decided to try to knock out this weekend. So, in typical weekend intelligence fashion, here are the highlights.

Backing up a few steps, I had wanted to go fishing this weekend, weather permitting. Well, it didn't: it rained and hard this weekend. When it became clear that it wasn't going to happen, after updating the few folks that had said they'd be interested in going out, one of DeAnn's friends said they were planning a camping trip to Pace Bend Park for the next weekend. Awesome! All I need to do is get my stuff in order...

After staying up entirely too late on Friday night, and the subsequent rousting at the crack of dawn by Clara being Clara, we decide we'll get some of the things we'll need at the weekly supply run. I think I may have successfully given the bug to D; since Clara would need her own gear, it was the perfect opportunity to get all sorts of cute princess camping gear. By the time we got out of the sporting goods, Clara had a Disney Princess sleeping bag, folding chair, fishing pole set and camping flashlight/lantern. We also got new sleeping bags and a new tackle box for the fishing supplies.

It's not that I didn't already have several sleeping bags and a tackle box. It's that these had been stowed away in the portal to the abyss that we call the garage for years. You see, we've been living in this house for going on 4 years now. Even in the beginning, we piled all the things that had been taking up space in the tiny storage closet we had at the apartment. It started out neat enough, but several years of stacking crap on crap turned the garage into a pit of despair. This practice got immeasurably worse during and following the Great Flood. By that point, we weren't even really stacking things neatly anymore; junk was just being thrown on top of the pile. At one point, I couldn't even wheel my grill out to cook on it - it had started to become one with the pit.

To top it off, the Texas wildlife had built their own miniature refuge. It had become it's own sick ecosystem: live bugs and spiders, dirt and grass clippings, insect nests, skeletal remains of small vermin, newts and toads. A feral cat had even once considered it a litter box and left several mementos in the far back. You know you have something to fear when you start to see dead cockroaches. Something that has proven perfectly capable of surviving global cataclysmic events met its end in my garage. Be afraid...

Anyway, the tackle box had long since been destroyed in an avalanche of crap, and this being Texas, God knows what's living in the sleeping bags. The folding chairs were wrapped in cobwebs and the fishing poles were snapped under the weight of falling boxes. The absolutely awesome Goldfish cooler had become buried in the strata of junk, no doubt well on it's way to becoming a diamond. It came down to the fact that if I really wanted to ever go camping and fishing again, I would need to excavate my gear from the garage, which meant cleaning the garage.

/sigh...

Ok... OK! I'll do it! I spent the rest of that day hauling just about everything, scuz and all, into the disinfecting light of day. The entire floor was thoroughly swept twice. All the shelving was wiped down with cleaner. I mounted two brackets to hold hoses and extension cords. Anything that I hauled out that could be salvaged was brushed off and wiped down. The rest was trashed. I found my old ginormous tent, still intact, if not dirty. Most of the folding chairs were OK, too, just needed a good shaking out. Colin's fishing pole was good, but the reel was shot. My fishing pole was shot, but the reel was OK. -.-; The tackle box was crushed to smithereens, but most of the tackle was intact. I had to stop about 5 feet from the back wall because the dumpster was completely full. But at least I can park the car in the garage now. I haven't been able to do that since... well... never.

The rest of the weekend was pretty uneventful after that. I was hurting something fierce the next day, but it was worth it. If I can find a nice day next week, I'll have Colin help me look for the base tarpaulins, set up the tent and seal the seams for the season. It's gonna be a rocking summer, I can feel it!