I used to have a reference here to something Wee wrote, about some really misguided and piteous individuals. Time has passed, and we've decided that it's better that we remove references to these people from the site, as well as our brains (damn, some sights are definitely better forgotten...). So there it is... or isn't, or whatever.

So did you hear in the news about the guy who's suing a bunch of fast-food chains because they didn't provide adequate warning that he'd develop obesity and heart disease if he ate massive quantities of their food on a regular basis? If not, here's an article on it...

Zac commented that, in the unlikely event that he won his suit, "we should all get a piece of the pie a la class action".

Rather than rewording my reply, I'll just choose the lazy route and copy it verbatim from email:

"No doubt! I had NO IDEA that eating a massive pile of starchy tubers deep-fried in pure fat and covered with salt would be BAD for me! Besides, I was TOTALLY manipulated by that huckster in the clown suit to go in and order the Big Mac Extra Value Meal with a vanilla shake - he said their food would make me happy - and it's, like, 5x bigger than their Happy Meal, so of course it should have made me 5x happier! Insetead it just made me 5x bigger! The lying bastard!

"This guy should be counter-sued by the fast-food people for frivolous litigation. Or the court should order him up some punishment like the bulldog in the Looney Tunes episode where the little dog gets sick of the big dog beating the crap out of him for bringing him meat without any gravy so he straps the bulldog down while he's asleep and sticks a funnel in his mouth and says "Here's your GRAVY!" and pours like a 55-gallon drum of it down his throat. Ahem. Anyway, that's what I think."

Jesus. Pretty soon people will actually begin suing their parents for suffering them to be born. I think that, when a judge dismisses a specious lawsuit, he should have the option of sentencing the would-be plaintiff to a public pelting with rotten tomatoes. Just line people up and let them have a go at the silly git with moldy produce. Maybe that would help...

Over the past 18 days, I have been in six different states - that's U.S. states, mind you, not mental ones - specifically: California, Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska, Nevada, and Oregon. All of the travel was family-related - three weekends ago I was working on my mother-in-law's new Second Look store; the following weekend I was at Crawford family reunion (reference my previous post); and this weekend I was in Klamath Falls to see my brother Thom and his wife and son, along with Suzi, Pete, Andy and my folks. I feel like my new title should be Family Goodwill Ambassador. Mind you, I've been quite happy to have face-time with the fellow swimmers in my gene-pool… but I'm ready to be a hermit again for a while.

Of course, before that happens, I do have one last familial bonding session ahead of me - I’m going to Vegas in mid-August with Mom-in-law Judy and all three of my Rhodes sister-in-laws to attend the ASD Trade Show. I'm really looking forward to this one, for several reasons: to bond with the other Rhodes girls a little; to enjoy fine Sin City accomodations and not have to pay for them (the trip is Judy's birthday present to all the girls, and a fine one it is; we're staying at the Venetian, hi-ho!); and to see the glory of the ASD show - 1,000+ booths' worth of screaming purveyors of "variety and general retail merchandise" pitching their wares in a veritable madhouse of bargain wholesale shopping. Judy has decided to make all of us her associate buyers in a sort of contest. We all have a certain budget, and she will track the merchandise each of us buys - each of us will receive 5% of the profits from our purchases, and whoever's merchandise makes the most profit for the store by the end of the year will get a $100 bonus. I figure all of us have our own strengths going into it: Mandy has the biggest advantage from having managed the store and knowing what sells, as well as being very in-tune with fashion trends; Lauren also works at the store and sees what sells; Christine has a good eye for fashion and is a veteran shopper; I myself am the only professional buyer in the group, although my retail experience is rusty. I'll be curious to see how it all pans out!

Between now and then, however, I’m looking forward to holing up in my house for a while and getting some equilibrium back. A loner chick like me can take only so much socializing before the craving for one's own space and free time becomes damned near pathological…

Wee and I attended the 2nd Crawford Family Reunion last weekend, once again held at the surprisingly lovely, lodge-like Lied Conference Center in Nebraska City, NE. The Crawford clan is by and large a warm, friendly, jovial group of people, so seeing them all again was really pretty enjoyable. Bill bore up like a trooper under the onslaught of hugging and small talk, and (mostly) good-natured teasing about our tendency toward being the last to show up at any given time. Our immediate branch of the family has gotten a rep among certain of the more uptight elements among the Heartland contingent for being boozers - basically because we didn't bother hiding from the teetotalor aunties the fact that we had a couple of cocktails in the evenings (and even the late afternoon - but it WAS 5:00 where we lived...) - our intake was completely moderate, and we weren't the only cousins drinking. Being from the West Coast, however, I think there was a preconceived notion of what our lifestyle would be, so our imbibing probably just reinforced the mild suspicions of deviancy that were sowed in parochial Midwestern brains by what they read and saw on TV, or stories they'd heard from others who'd braved a trip to the Wild West and survived to serve up accounts of strange Left Coast ways. Still, it was easy enough to decide to be oblivious to any such nonsense, and it did give the cluckers something a little juicy to peck at, so it's all good. The crew of cousins we hung out with in the evenings were funny, personable and totally unpretentious - we enjoyed their company a lot.

Anyway, I had fun chatting and catching up - and now know way more than I ever expected to about things like worm farming and the CRP subsidy program. Thinking about it afterward, though, I wish I'd made more of an effort to drag some "good old days" stories out of the older members of the family. Dad's always been pretty parsimonious with his stories about his life growing up, and I wish I'd thought to drag him into a conversation with some of his sisters and the older cousins and really get the scoop on history. I may still try to pull out some of the little tidbits I did glean, though, and see if he'll elaborate on them sometime… like the time he purt-near blew cousin Bill's face off with an M-80 rocket in a ditch, or the fact that his mom never had indoor plumbing till the day she died. Good times!

On Saturday night, I went firefly hunting in the stand of oak and hickory trees down behind the lodge with my cousin Mike, his sweet wife Lori, and their two smart and adorable boys, David and Danny. The glowbug population was more scarce than my last visit, probably due to the heat. The boys had no luck snagging any bounty, which I'd have felt worse about if they didn't have fireflies aplenty in their own backyard at home. They didn't seem too devastated about it; I think the thrill of the chase in the dark was excitement enough. I, however, did manage to snag a slow-moving keeper in my little boullion jar (which the boys had kindly brought for me, knowing I'd be up for a hunt). His little LED belly blinked furiously for me as we wandered around in the night-clad orchard. I wasn't sure he'd perform once we got back to our room, but once Bill turned off the TV and we settled down to sleep the green flash of Glowbug once again began flickering in earnest. Bill's tipoff to this was when I started giggling in the dark. I confess that I lost a foolish amount of sleep to firefly-gazing - I just hated to let the performance go to waste. In the morning I let it go - it freaked out like a tiny vampire at being exposed to the sun, but once it scrabbled its way into a patch of shade under some bark it seemed to be OK.

We ended up at the airport about 6 hours early, and found that the terminal had no lockers in which to stash our stuff, we couldn't check it until another several hours, and the airport had very little in the way of comfortable lounging establishments. So, in order to preserve our sanity, we decided to rent a car and tour the town. This may have been a better idea had the weather not been so nasty as to pretty much kill any notions of visiting one of the many parks dotting the city. However, we did behold the majesty of the Mutual of Omaha corporate HQ; we saw an big ornate building on top of a hill and drove up to take a look - it turned out, somewhat anti-climactically, to be Central High School; behind it was the Museum of Art (which we pondered visiting before deciding we weren't in the mood for art appreciation). After listlessly cruising the empty streets of downtown for a while, we decided our best option was to head to the university area and see what we found. This lead us to the Crossroads mall, where we bought a small pile of books from Barnes and Noble and hung out the rest of the afternoon. OK, hanging out at the mall isn't the most culturally enlightening thing to do when visiting a new city. Sightseeing in Omaha was more of an act of avoiding airport limbo rather than a bona-fide tourist impulse anyway, though, and the Crossroads met our three major requirements: air conditioning; decent food and beverage selection; someplace comfy to sit and read. Besides, what better place than the mall to observe the native populace and their culture? We noted that the fluffy-perm look, with optional high-rise bangs and crispy texture via liberal application of hair-styling products, is still as popular a look for today's Omaha maiden as it was for everyone else in the late 80's; ditto for pastel frost eyeshadow. Among the menfolk, mullets have not lost their appeal, although the dominant haircut is a short, neat, completely untrendy cut reminiscent of military barbering - probably very comfortable under ball caps and guaranteed not to earn you any disapproving looks in church. NASCAR and sports-related apparel is as hot as hot can be. Go Huskers!

At any rate, I'm glad we went - it was a change of scenery, a chance to spend some time with a group of nice people with whom I share genes, and an opportunity to make my dad really happy just by our being there. Even when set in the Hell-spawned sauna of south-eastern Nebraska in midsummer, all told it was a fine way to spend a weekend.

As much out of compulsion as tradition, at sunset on July 4th I went out to watch me some fireworks. Although pretty much any sort of light show sucks me in like a moth to a bugzapper, I come particularly unhinged for pyrotechnics. This year I didn't feel like driving too far so I chose to check out the show at a local high school, my observation point the wrong side of a chain-link fence overlooking the football field. It was one of the more meager displays I've seen in a while, like maybe the fundraising campaign didn't go so well. Even though they had some of my favorites (the gold ones that explode and then shimmer as they fall) and some that I hadn't seen before (ones that burst in multicolor dots, then sent out a halo of screeching silver corkscrews - the noise made them big crowd-pleasers), all told it was just OK.

Still, as I stood there looking over the crowd - hordes of kids wearing glow necklaces or sitting wrapped in quilts next to their folks, parents in sweats grinning at the kids' oohs and aahs, teenagers torn between checking out the show and checking out each other - I began to think of other July 4ths... other places, other people who were there with me. I felt a strong sense of deja-vu, thinking of younger me standing in the dark, watching the show, a year ago, five years ago, twenty years ago...

The only display I ever saw when I was a kid was the one over Klamath Lake - most years we'd watch from my house, since we were on a hill and could see them pretty well from there. Once my brother helped me up onto the roof; I'd always been envious when the folks let him go up there to fetch a frisbee or hang Christmas lights, so I thought that was a pretty audacious and thrilling place for me to be. As a teenager, I went with friends and climbed into the hills next to the lake. The summer I turned 18, a friend let us sneak onto his dad's docked boat, toting our contraband wine coolers. We felt privileged and daring, the boat bobbing beneath us as we tucked back bottles of Bartles and James and hooted at the show, our voices carrying over the water but still anonymous amidst the other floating spectators. It was the last summer my childhood friends and I would ever spend together. Like bottles chucked off the S.S. Mighty Pelican into the sea of What Next, we all drifted to different places after high school. I don't think any of us who were on that boat even live in the same state as any other now; the odds of that are pretty steep for a bunch of kids from a small town in Oregon, where getting out seems to be as impossible for some as it is imperative for others.

The next year found me camping at Diamond Lake with new friends from my summer job at Crater Lake. We were all very intoxicado, stumbling around in the dark woods on the edge of the lake and caterwauling patriotic tunes at the top of our lungs amidst giggles and the fwhump-boom!-crackle of the fireworks. Less fun, by contrast, was the part later in the evening where we got rounded up by Park Rangers and handed M.I.P. citations... I vaguely remember mumbling, "Yes sir, yes sir" repeatedly at one of the officers - until I was hissed at by my boyfriend-du-jour to shut the hell up, as the "sir" in question was actually a "ma'am"; I'm surprised she didn't haul my dizzy ass in. I confess, though, that there's a corner of my good-girl soul that relishes the memory of my single non-vehicular run-in with The Law. The court in which we pleaded our case was a one-room strip-mall setup in tiny Canyonville, OR; as we drove up, our intimidation was tempered by the humor of seeing it nestled humbly between a dry-cleaner's and a deli. The judge was a friendly older gal who listened to our carefully-rehearsed pleadings for mercy and kindly reduced the fine to something more managable to a bunch of college kids on seasonal wages. We were reassured that, as legal adults, nothing would be sent to our parents to tip them off to our failings... Although years later my sister told me that, of all unlikely things, a contact of my father's in the Medford Police Dept. happened to see my name on a list, connected it to Dad, and spilled the beans. Dad's never discussed it with me - just like I've never discussed with him a certain driving-related infraction he incurred many years ago, of which I'm sure he thinks I am not aware. A little quid pro quo in family secret-keeping never hurts.

Fast-forward to the first year Bill and I shared July 4th together… Bill had come to stay with me for a couple of weeks in the summer after he completed his Geology Field Camp. We were engaged, and had spent over two months apart, so we were, needless to say, a tiny bit pleased to be together again. He'd rented a sporty red car - a Mazda something-or-other - and we drove it over to Newport to see the show there. We drove up into a construction site on a hill and parked on the summit. Lacking other seating options, we decided to kick back on the hood of the car ("It's a rental!"). The way the fireworks glittered over the dark water dotted with tiny bobbing boat lights was magical, all the more so because we were giddy with lovestruck comradery (and possibly something else, though that's none-yo...) to begin with. The next day, we discovered all the sand-laden scratches we'd put on the hood of the brand new rental car, and panicked; however, we also found to our relief that the polish you can buy in auto-supply stores that promises to minimize paint scratches actually works well enough to pass casual inspection by a rental clerk.

The Independence Day after that, we watched fireworks with our toes dug into the sand of Waikiki Beach, midway through our honeymoon in Hawaii. Blissful.

Recent Independence Days have been less eventful, but only once have I not had a fireworks show to watch, and then not by choice - it was the year the Rhodes family spent up at the family cabin, Adullam, where a local drought made fireworks verboten. It bothered me a lot to miss them - more than I expected. (Said cabin, incidentally, missed being engulfed last week by the Rodeo-Chediski fire by, oh, all of 4 miles… Whew!).

I've come to realize that Fireworks on the Fourth of July are a more important tradition to me than turkey on Thanksgiving, almost more important than a decorated tree at Christmas. The memories of them - where I was, who I was with, what my life was like in that moment - are like index tags in the book of years past. They help me keep track. And every single time, they make me happy.