Today I transported one thousand pounds of yard waste to the local dump.  It took two trips.  Both times felt like my back was going to break.  One of those times I needed to use my emergency tow rope to hold all the bags in.

I was expecting a big, burly, angry white man at this imagined dump.  Chewing on a cigar and yelling at me for not knowing the procedures.  It turned out to be a very friendly small black lady that called me honey and told me not to tell her sorry for not knowing where to go.  It was actually a pleasant experience.  Relaxing, almost meditative in a way only a daily cubical worker can find it, I guess.  I want to haul more stuff to the dump now.  But I’m all cleaned out.  Almost ready for the next challenge.  The dreaded re-finance.  I’ll hang on the whim of the banks to tell me that I’ll have a happy, wonderful year of single home ownership, or a nightmare year of struggling to make payments… All in all, it’s quite a fun ride…. So far…

1. Turducken Der Suckens.
2. The best part was the mashed potatoes.  It was mashed cauliflower.
3. My spur of the moment (literally, as I pulled the turducken out of the oven and saw I had a good amount of turducken drippings) gravy made with the last handful of fat free buttermilk biscuit mix I had and a pinch of baking powder actually turned out amazing.
4. The diet (Splenda) cranberry juice was the perfect final addition to single guy Thanksgiving.
5. Sitting at a table is nice. (Last week I finally finished assembling the two-person bistro table for the kitchen that was started about two years ago and had instead became the kitchen junk pile.)

I was going to take a pic of the wonderful pizza I had at Amante’s in Issaquah. (first pizza in over six months) Instead, I got art…..

Meet Bubba’s chew toy.

Yes, that would be a moose leg.

No, this is not our dog. Thank goodness.

Steven: Bubba is an unofficial wrangler at the Alpaca Farm down the street from us.  However, that usually just means him sleeping at the edge of the driveway and occasionally getting into poorly secured neighbor garbage cans.  We were pondering if this was truly a wonderful gift from his Alpaca Farm family or the sweetest garbage find ever for a dog… Either way, he was very, very happy…

By Steven..

I was living in Germany enlisted in the United States Air Force.  It was a total clusterfuck, with everything that could go wrong, going very very wrong.  In the end it was all for the best as I was able to get out before the mindless drone mentality sunk into me.

The important part of this story is how I was dealing with the whole situation.  Mostly drinking heavily and dressing up as alterna-grunge and listening to too much Nirvana.

There was this very plain ordinary guy in the same living facilities I was in that was totally comfortable with the whole German scene.  One of those few people that can just seem to blend in.  That knows how things worked.  He looked just like Rick Steve’s and acted like him too.  Hell, might of been him.

Anyway, he saw my “look” and wanted to know if I’d be interested in going with him to a traveling punk party that was going on in the Rhine Valley area that we called home.  I said hell yes, and we were off to find a dark industrial building in the middle of nowhere with only a poorly copied flier to guide us.

We ended up finding it.  As I wasn’t driving and dollar to mark prices were excellent back then, I was already very much heavily into the drinks by the time Weird Al’s “Smells like Nirvana” came blaring over the speakers.

The punk Germans had no clue.  They thrashed to it with all their pent-up angst.  They writhed and gnashed.

I reveled in that moment.  Such irony.  It’s now burned into my memory.  The darkness, the smoke.  The foreignness of the whole situation.  Everyone speaking in what seemed like tongues.  The writhing mass of strange.

Wasn’t much after that I was told to fly to New Jersey to exit the military.  After that night, it really wasn’t that strange of a request.  I called a friend in a town I happened to stay for a month of military training - Denver, and asked her if I could move in with her.  She hesitantly said yes.

I arrived in Denver and spent a wonderful 5 years of my life growing into adulthood.  That Denver friend is long gone and married, but the memories of Germany and Denver are in my mind forever…

…with a fro.

I’m not a big smoker at all, but when I saw these Marlboro cloves I had to order them direct from Indonesia…

Update: Eh… They suck.  Even though these are made under contract for Marlboro by Sampoerna, they still contain the grotesque bland cardboard-tasting Marlboro tobacco.  A total miss according to both myself and Sarah.  The Indonesian web store had a minimum two carton order, so I also bought Djarum Black Slimz.  We both agree these are infinitely better smokes…

I was delighted to find this old photo of my great great grandfather, Cornelius Reginald Boger III. This was taken just after returning from a long ride into Rapid City to attend to his recently deceased fathers affairs. Seen here with his trusty pipe and the horse saddlebags still slung over his shoulder.