Year: 2004

This weekend I ended up at a baseball game with Samantha, Cat, and Cat’s friend Sameer. The Mariners lost to the Red Sox 8-0. Reagan was president the last time I went to a Mariners game. They lost that game too. Am I bad luck or what?

Oil leaks and antifreeze spills from months or years of parked cars burn a low spot into the middle of a parking space at the Washington Mutual parking lot, and a sparrow sips day-old rainwater from a shallow puddle that’s formed there.

The miniature replica of George W. Bush’s cowboy hat is in the mail, on its way to its new owner. The final bidder paid $26, and that was immediately donated to MoveOn.org. Thank you to everyone who bid. I hope to see Bush wearing that cowboy hat again soon… when he rides into the sunset on Inauguration Day.

Register to vote.

I’m cataloging the books that I picked up yesterday, working on a university press book about race and the justice system. It’s marked with a yellow “Used” sticker from a college bookstore. I flip through the pages and notice some highlighting — Damn, I wouldn’t have picked it up if I’d noticed that. A closer inspection finds that the highlighting is isolated to the first nine pages — the introduction. The corner of the ninth page is bent over as a page marker. The 290 pages that follow appear to be unread — a dropped class. I finish cataloging the book. Now bored of data entry, I refresh Bloglines and click through to a couple of sites. Then I write this blog entry; and just as I’m finishing the sentence that’s three sentences back — “…a dropped class” — one of the bulbs in my desk-side lamp burns out. It flashes blue-white and then the room is dark.

There’s less than a day left to cast a bid on this miniature replica of George W. Bush’s hat. The eBay auction closes Monday at 10:00 am Pacific Time. The high bid, as of Sunday afternoon, is $22.81. The auction proceeds are being donated to MoveOn.org.

We went to The Woodland Park Zoo on Friday. My earliest traceable memory is of a zoo, and since then I’ve been to the San Diego Wild Animal Park a couple of times. The last time was years and years ago. I felt sort of zoo illiterate. But the monkeys eased me into things.

The Beans for Breakfast printable calendar for September is ready to be downloaded, printed out, and to have calendary things done with it.

I know that some of you will be concerned that the squares are slightly smaller this month. Others will ask, “What happened to the little circle at the top of the page? How am I supposed to center my thumbtack?” I sympathize with these issues, but I hope that you’ll focus on the strengths of this month’s calendar. For instance, the calendar comes packaged for two different paper formats with different, but equally satisfying, length/width ratios. (And besides, you can locate the middle of the page based on the thumbtack hole from the last calendar. Place September over August, line up the edges, and hold it up to a light. The August thumbtack hole will show through the page. Mark the spot on the September calendar with a pencil, and recycle August.)

The files are trim 57 kb PDFs:
Letter-size
A4 Format

Samantha’s apolitical boss was convinced to make a contribution to the Republican party in exchange for an award and a “replica of George W. Bush’s cowboy hat” with one of his famous quotes printed on it. She got some grief from Samantha and the business’s bookkeeper, and eventually promised to give the hat to Samantha to auction off on Ebay in order to raise money for the Kerry campaign. (Unfortunately she doesn’t regret making the donation so much as she finds the auction idea sporting.)

So we have up for auction one slightly used trophy with a tiny reproduction of a George W. Bush’s cowboy hat mounted on it. The plaque has a genuinely hypocritical quote by President Bush printed on it. Hopefully we’ll be able to partly offset Samantha’s boss’s Republican donation with a progressive donation of our own. Proceeds from the sale will be used to make a donation to MoveOn.org — one of those controversial 527 organizations that’s putting out ads against Bush. (Contributions to the Kerry campaign and the Democratic Party have to go directly to the campaign — they can’t be raised by a third party like me.)

The auction is here. It ends on Monday, September 6. The opening bid is $5. Bid early and bid often!

On Friday we went to the Dayments’ August Everything Party. Things took a surprising twist at around 9:00 when the party turned into a wedding.

Samantha and I wandered around her neighborhood on Saturday afternoon. Things were blooming, and Samantha had to touch everything that had flowers or fruit. She broke off berries, flowers, and vegetables and broke them open to see what was inside. When she couldn’t break something open, she sawed it apart with her dull Perfumania pocket knife.

We saw b.b. guns at two different yard sales, and I bought an optical mouse for a dollar. Then we went back inside and Samantha beat Bowser in Super Mario World.

On Sunday, we went to the Evergreen State Fair in Monroe with John and Tyd. The fair had at least one of nearly every kind of animal that I can think of and several animals that I never would have thought of.

Here’s another batch of graffiti and street art photos. We’ll begin with a little apathy