"Help me! Help me!"

My compulsion to organize intruded today. Again. I received a gift of five Halloween-themed Pez candy dispensers. Each package contained a dispenser and two packets of the much-maligned candy. Lemon and grape. All five. Five lemons. Five grapes. What happened to the randomness of Pez candy? Where was the strawberry? The orange? The quite tasty cherry? Grape are my least favorite. I'd say I just don't like them, but I do eat them. I don't throw away candy. I loaded lemon into the black cat, and grape into the remaining four. I'll make myself eat the grape ones before I get to the really good ones. If you don't eat your vegetables, you won't get any dessert. I also like to save the shrimp in stir-fry dishes for last. Back to my compulsion. On a shelf in my cubicle sweet cubicle sits my modest Pez dispenser collection. There are now 61 of them. They run the gamut from the Simpsons to Hello Kitty, and are not grouped together in any real order. A layer of dust throughout. Tumbledust bunnies drift gently among the dispenser stumps with the circulating air currents of the office. The dispensers stand like dominoes. If one goes down, they all go down. What I want to do is to organize them. Put the Star Wars ones together. The Looney Toons too. And so on. I could also take the opportunity to really dust the shelf. While I'm at it, I could catalog the collection. I could create metadata to describe the whole thing, from the sub-sets, for example, the Flintstones, down to the individual dispensers (Fred, Barney, Dino). First I would like to get a master checklist of Pez dispensers. I love checklists. Goes back to my baseball card-collecting days. A few searches on Google served only to compound my dilemma. There seems to be no single authoritative list. The ones I did find, upon cursory examination, were clearly wanting. Or still under construction. Perpetually, one would surmise. I am going to do something. I just don't know what. Yet. By the way, Dear Reader, my favorite Pez dispenser is the Fly head. I think of the movie of the same name. The original one, with Vincent Price. Not the re-make. Do you remember how it ends?

schwng vwls (nvr Y)

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Here Kitty, Kitty (Hello Newman mix)

I don't know how or why these things enter my mind. They just do. I won't apologize for them either. Friday was my son Paul's sixteenth birthday. Sweet sixteen. Over the years, I can count on one partially-fingered hand the number of his birthdays that have fallen on a visitation weekend. I had to make this one special. Well, I didn't have to. I wanted to. My mind, cleared of all but the most innocuous of baseball statistics, an idea entered. Reared really. Hello Kitty. Hello Kitty? Hello Kitty! Purrfect. What a theme for a sixteen-year-old boy's birthday. Indeed. At the store the whim snowballed when, perusing the book of special order cakes, I saw it. The Hello Kitty cake. Complete with pink transparent plastic Hello Kitty purse and Hello Kitty compact embedded in the icing. Oh yeah! But the cake would not be enough Dear Reader, now would it? No. In the days preceding the event, I managed to acquire a vinyl Hello Kitty placemat, a couple of Hello Kitty plates, some Hello Kitty stickers, and Hello Kitty wrapping paper for Paul's presents, which were not Hello Kitty themed. But wait! There's more! Paul's girlfiend Sarah was going to be in town as well, visiting her grandparents. This just gets better and better, doesn't it? Well, Susie agreed to pick up Paul and Sarah to bring them to our party, and to get Sarah to her grandfolks afterward. Words, Dear Reader, simply cannot do justice to Paul's, and Sarah's reactions to the cake, with sixteen candles ablaze. For the record, it was chocolate cake, with chocolate buttercream frosting and raspberry filling. Suffering succotash. Oops. Wrong cat.

I am the egg man

My son was here this weekend. It was his sixteenth birthday and we had a little party. But, I'll have to write about that another day, after I get a picture to include with the post. I wasn't going to write anything today, until there was a knock on my door a few hours after my son had returned to his mother's house. Who could it be? I peeked through the peep hole and saw it was Brian, one of the Special Olympians I coach. I opened the door and all he said was "Here's a salmon." Brian is quite the accomplished fisherman and has brought many salmon and a few steelhead to me over the past few years. I've gone to the store and returned home to find salmon on my porch. In plastic trash bags. A couple years ago he delivered three salmon in three days. This one weighed in at just under thirty pounds, and still needed to be cleaned. Oh joy. Brian asked if I would save any eggs for him to use as bait on future fishing trips. I invested in a smoker to deal with all the fish I was getting. I love smoked salmon. Everybody loves smoked salmon. I set up the smoker on my porch, which is partially enclosed. To prevent smoke building up and bothering my neighbors, I take the battery out of my smoke detector in the hallway, and turn on a box fan that faces out the back bedroom. For a few hours, while the salmon is smoking, there is a jet stream of delicious fishy hickory smoke shooting in the front door of my apartment, down the hallway, and out the back window. For days afterwards my apartment smells just lovely. Really. There needs to be an air freshener so scented. I'd buy it. For the time being, I'll just look forward to smoking this fish, probably Wednesday, after I dry cure it. Oh, and I'll be going to soccer practice Tuesday to give Brian a cottage cheese container full of salmon eggs.

And I don't drive

Opening day! No, of course not baseball, Dear Reader. Were this spring, that would have been a good guess. It is now hockey season. Officially. I'm still learning to watch the NHL on TV, but I love to go to the local ice rink and watch the Junior B League team, the Eugene Generals. There's usually about 500 people at games so finding a good seat is relatively easy. They only play on weekends because the players are 15-20 years old and have to bother with high school. Many of them at least. When a fight breaks out on the ice, I am struck with the notion that these kids are the ones who would be in the at-risk classes at school. On ritalin. It's a good thing there is hockey to allow them to vent. Between periods I love to watch the zamboni re-surface the ice. I count the laps, waiting until the right moment to return to my seat. The regular zamboni guy is pretty efficient, careful not to overlap his rounds too much, avoiding additional spins around the rink. The back-up takes a couple of extra turns, and a little more time to get the ice ready. I go to work pretty early in the morning and see the custodial crew putting the finishing touches on the library as night gives way to day. Vacuuming a library would be pretty daunting were it not for the riding vacuum cleaner. This thing is so cool! It's a carpet zamboni. I have come around corners and almost been hit by it. I'd love to drive the carpet zamboni. Even just get a ride on it. I am limited by space and furniture in my apartment to cleaning only the high-traffic areas when I vacuum. I don't think there is enough room for a carpet zamboni to turn around for the next pass. All this talk of zambonis has me now thinking about Snoopy and Woodstock "talking" about hockey. How does Snoopy always begin his novels? "It was a dark and stormy night." Now that Dear Reader is simply inane writing. Pedestrian even.