Ketchup 

Tuesday 23 June 98 12:37 pm 
Yeah I'm at work; it's lunchtime.  Do ya know, I'm constantly writing this journal in my head.  All the time.  Very little of it actually makes it into the HTML though.  Very little of it gets remembered long enough. 
    I was in the bakery this morning picking up a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich for El Presidente (a little ass kissing never hurts) when a sudden hush dropped on the room.  I turned around and saw a guy in a business suit, nothing out of the ordinary. 
    "Hi David," said the counter lady, her orange hair in a French twist. 
    "Hi Gorgeous," he replied to her, boredly, as he hunted around for coffee condiments. 
    Sotto voce, she leaned over to another of the bakery people and asked for help with the recepts she was dealing with.  "David got me all excited," she said.  It was funny and weird at once. 
    The other day the kids and I took a walk down the road after work/daycare.  I felt good, baggy overalls and tank undershirt, and the sky was good, the air clear with good humidity.  We picked honeysuckle from the bushes.  As we rounded down near the end of the runway, a small plane was taking off.  Darth waved energetically as it swooped overhead, and the pilot did that swimming kind of gesture pilots make the airplanes do when they mean to wave at someone.  This thrilled all three of us immensely.  The plane kept going over us, making a circle and doing it again, for the whole rest of the walk.  I figured the pilot was practicing something, and later in the week I saw someone else practicing a stunt in a different plane. 
    The kids and I went to the end of the driveway, which is at the top of a big hill overlooking the whole main runway.  This one plane would approach the runway, go really, really slow, float down as if for a landing, then at the moment of touching, climb nearly striaght up with as much power as it could muster, returning to its previous altitude and making a circle to do it again.  On some of these passes, it never touched the ground, and on others it did; guess that's why the pilot needs practice. 
    I promised to talk about a few things, and I only have a few minutes so I better get started. 
    Moonbeams.  The house looks like a commercial for Andersen windows.  Now several of these are older and they open with a crank.  Two have already jumped their tracks and I'll need another pair of hands to help me fix them.  Anyway, all these windows are all around, and there is only one bedroom.  The kids have that.  Part of the living/dining combination has a lower ceiling and is partially partitioned off from the rest of the room, so this is my "bedroom."  The corner of this room has these huge windows on both sides, and much of the plane of the ecliptic falls through these windows, so if I were inclined to stay awake, I could watch the moon track across the sky.   The moonlight and starlight sliding across my bed, as it is diagonal in this corner, is truly a lovely sight, and the view of the pines and the runway and the stars is magnificent. 
    The horse farm.  Down the road from me, toward the highway, is a horse farm.  They have more than horses, they have cows and chickens, goats and dogs as well.  There is a large stable and several pens, a few nice pastures, some smaller paddocks.  The horses eye us suspiciously whenever we go by.  The dogs yap, the chickens ignore us, and the goats stop goofing around momentarily to see what's up.  We have to drive past the place on every entry and exit, as it borders right on the airport grounds.  The people, when we see them, return our waves amiably. 
    Last week traffic on the highway came almost to a complete sudden stop, no accidents, thank God.  I looked around the truck in front of me to see what the deal was.  It was a pack of geese, crossing the road.  EVERYbody had stopped for them.  I like that. 
    Theres a nice little hot dog/hamburger joint down the way.  It's a Stewart's, as in the soda, root beer and orange 'n' cream.  It's pretty old fashioned and a garish sight in orange and black.  The girl behind the counter wore a Jiffy Lube shirt that had "Brian" embroidered over the pocket.  The kids liked eating at the bar.  Barstools are neat, heh. 
    More later, gotta jet.  Later, again, I'll play "ketchup." 

New Cast, New Scenery, New Props 
 
Friday 19 June 98 3:40 pm 
Yes, I'm playing hooky for a bit from work.  My brain is fried from design on the Dry & Thirsty website.  I doubt many non-designers understand how tiring this grafix stuff is. 
    Past few days, I have been struggling over whether to use aliases for people I'll be mentioning or not.  Some do the net thing, some don't.  Some might not mind being mentioned, and some might mind a great deal, so it's prolly best to go ahead and use the pseudonyms.  Now it's a question of whether to use silly names like I did for Twink and Moomie and Boober.  Yeah, think I will. 
    El Presidente is the president, obviously.  He's the guy who got the backer on board to start this company, and he pretty much runs the show in his "spare" time (like he has any), as he still works full time for his other company.  He's a short jolly bearded ball of energy, but don't piss him off.  And especially don't screw him over; he's from Brooklyn. 
    The Straight Man seems to be just that, your regular American dad, hard working, serious, reliable.  He used to own the speedway that the SpringDew slot car did its racing at, but he was ready for a change of career.  He's done this selling and delivery thing before, and quite well, so he took to it like home.  He's clean cut, tall, thin and getting a bit grey, and nearly rivals El Presidente as the sharpest dresser among us. 
    The Condiman has a thing for condiments, be it dressings, sauces, or dips.  He's swaggeringly confident, and with good right.  He knows his stuff, having worked at beverage sales for some time now.  He's sturdily built and tanned. 
    Fast Forward moves at about the speed of light, which is prolly good since he works the New York beat.  He talks fast, moves fast, and radiates manic energy.  He's ever polite and sociable, and is the most casual dresser in the outfit.  I dig his tattoos. 
    Doctor Green-face is what I call one of the two pilots who live downstairs from me in the hangar, simply because he resembles Anthony Edwards to some extent.  He's friendly, doesn't seem nervous or shy.  He gets along good with my kids, which is major plus points in my reckoning. 
    I'm having a hard time naming the other pilot, as I haven't seen him too much.  He was the one too exhausted to join us for dinner last week.  He has a slick kinda frat-boy look about him, everything is just a hair too right.  Ah!  Billboard Boy
    The two pilots and I form the Pickup Club.  Doc Green has an older blue four wheel drive jobbie that until recently had a camper on the back of it, but now doesn't.  I must ask him why.  Billboard has a big shiny sleek new looking pickup, a GMC I think, not sure.  Mine is a battered old Ranger, one of whose main colors is primer grey. 
    Get-it-Doner and Faithful could probably qualify for the Pickup Club too, as their trucks are often parked at the hangar while they work on the pilots' quarters downstairs.  Doner is in charge of maintenance and Faithful is one of his crew.  Both are very amicable and chatty.  I like that.  Both are older guys who are the very picture of stereotypical maintenance guys, strong and wiry. 
    Mr. Barnum is the owner of the airport.  He has some background in the carnival industry and in Naval Aviation, but he's owned this airport for over forty years.  He's my next door neighbor as well as D&T's landlord.  Like everyone around here seems to be, he's very friendly and accommodating.  He has funny things going on here that you wouldn't expect for a fuel-stop and advertising banner kind of airport.  There's a set of train tracks running all around the strip, and a pair of small locomotives to go with them.  One appears to be a diesel and one a steam train, though it's likely both run on electricity.  These are stored for now in the train station by the tiny terminal building, as I understand they need some repair before being pressed back into service.  In that same area, the Terminal Zone, is a glassed-in gazebo being used as storage for a wide array of odd items and a playground that needs a bit of yard work before it can be re-opened. 
    Zeus is Mr. Barnum's old Great Dane.  Originally black all over, age has turned his face and paws nearly white.  He's so tall that he can put his chin on my countertop without effort.  He loves cheese and chicken dumplings, and is very gentle around the kids. 
    The Treehouse is what my kids named our house, although it's really perched on top of the hangar and just surrounded by trees.  The pilots' quarters is really just a shacklike structure inside the hangar with some amenities that, from what I hear, bring it up to dorm room quality. 
    The Hangar/The Warehouse/The Office are all names for our headquarters, a combination office and partial hangar space off in a corner of the airport.  The wiring is quirky, but there is room for everything, and it looks pretty good. 
    The Postal Shack is a little building with nothing but post office boxes in it, ours among them.  It's a stop on my rounds. 
    The Daycare, well that's self-explanatory ain't it?  The building is large and old, but rather cool these hot days.  The kids and staff seem pretty cool as well. 
    Bell Atlantic (no pseudonym there) are my nemeses, enemies, and sworn adversaries.  You want to put me in a rage, just mention them once.  This is probably one of the most frustrating phone companies I've ever had the misfortune to deal with. 
    Ok, ok, my conscience alarm is going off.  I need to get back to work. 

Visitation  

Saturday 13 June 98 9:50 pm 
Where to begin?  I'm sitting in the living room/office of my new apartment (house?), cathedral ceiling lit up by directional lights, vista on the other side of enormous plate glass windows plunged into murky rainy blackness.  The apartment is heavenly, a true steal thanks to the tyranny of zoning laws, making me one of a very tiny minority authorized to live here. 
    I live and work at an airport.  It's a minor airport, a nexus for fuel-hungry lear jets on the way to elsewhere, for banner-dragging small planes bound for NYC and the shore, for flight instructors, and, formerly, for the FBI.  In fact, the FBI ran out of this very apartment an undercover operation that is now defunct.  The baseboards are lined with phone jacks. 
    Only people who work at the airport may stay here, as long as their duties require them to be on airport grounds.  It was easy to add "night watchman" to my list of responsibilities.  In exchange for this I get something resembling a ski lodge perched atop a cinder block hangar, nestled into a hill under evergreen trees.  A deck goes three quarters of the way around.  Nearby is an observation point on the hill from which you can watch the traffic on the main runway.  There are lots more lovely pluses, and a few minuses, such as the baseboard heat that is too expensive to run, and the dribbly slow water pressure from a nearby pump-run well. 
    And right next to me, dinking with the old puter, is the Huz. 
    He's made a partial recovery from the shock of my departure, enough to come up and see the kids, bring some of their and my stuff, and pick up some of his stuff that got moved accidentally.  He was caustic, nasty, at first, and who can blame him really, but he's eased up some, once he realized I'm not singlemindedly driven to destroy him in every way possible.  He still doesn't grok the concept of peace in a home, and for that I feel sad, for he won't understand any of this until he does. 
    So, anyway, he came up while I had to work today, meeting the accountant to establish the payroll and accounts for the new Dry & Thirsty Beverage Distribution, Inc., distributors of Jones Soda.  I wore my brand new embroidered denim shirt with the D&T logo on the back.  He took the kids with him for lunch, then came back to help me unload what he'd brought into the house. 
    He was jealous.  I think he'd expected to find a tiny cold wet hovel and instead found the house that the airport owner had built for himself, then had moved out of into a newer bigger house.  I think he'd expected this whole job/move thing to be some kind of front for an elaborate sexual arrangement, but he found that my "bedroom" is really a section of living/dining room set aside for a bed with no privacy at all, not so conducive to raucous sex.  He'd also found that the company and the job were legit, he saw me actually doing my job today. 
    We took the kids to look for a movie theater but found a bookstore instead.  After that was shopping for ingredients for tonight's big supper.  I'd invited the pilots from the temporary quarters in the hangar downstairs to come up to supper.  Spaghetti and salad, with ice cream for dessert.  One of the pilots bowed out, though, due to exhaustion, but came up after his nap to collect his roomie. 
    The reason the pilots are here is that during the summer, they are hired to drag banners around the sky, and they need temporary residence on the airport.  There are these little bachelor quarters scattered hither and yon on the grounds for this, and inside the hangar below is a kind of inner shack that serves the purpose. 
    They then left for a hockey game, DC vs. Detroit.  It was fun to talk to these guys, both of whom seem young, energetic and smart.  I hope they spend more time visiting up here. 
    Most of the stuff is unpacked and settled, except what he brought today.  Utilities are up, except for one of the phone lines that didn't get installed as per instruction and must be done Monday.   D&T is off to a rolling start, and the kids are in a good daycare.  Now we just have some legal and logistical issues to straighten out.  I'm amenable to anything that seems fair and healthy to the kids.  This is hard to negotiate, with him flip-flopping between calm reason and belligerent raving, contradicting himself within minutes.  It's kind of scary, seeing him go from viscious to kind in a mere moment.  Reminds me of Hunk-Ra and Boopsie in the Doonsbury cartoons. 
    Now it's raining.  No moonbeams spilling onto my bed this night, but that's ok.  I'll tell more about that later.  And about the horse farm, and about the geese, and the hot dog stand, and the antique airplanes, and the view of New York, and the race track, etc. etc.  Pics, too.