mission: school supplies.
status: successful.
translation: nobody throwed up in the walmarts. we set the bar high.
this is how we roll
July 29, 2009 — welfareloser
special effects
July 22, 2009 — welfareloseryeah. it’s special, alright. special as a ride on an over-crowded short bus. this 11-minute video is the “pikachu news.” apparently, pikachu and piplup give a newscast, but are interrupted by a metroid attack. or so the twits tell me. we’re working on such concepts as “clarity of plot” for future video endeavors. SpazMonkey and DramaQueen did all the special effects themselves… except for one caption that i snuck in myself. probably obvious which one it is.
the twits made the dvd cover art, and then wrote up invitations to their friends in the neighborhood, ran around delivering them, and came back, friends in tow, for the official screening. should you be bored enough to actually watch it, you will want these 11 minutes of your life back, but 5-7 year olds think it’s awesome… enough to watch more than once, even. the lightning effects! the bouncing, swirling, scrolling captions! the funny voices! the non-stop sound effects/soundtrack mash-up! the “artistic” camera angles!
they also wanted to show it to others not within barefoot-sidewalk-traversing distance. burning 100s of copies on dvd got nixed by their cheap-ass mother, so they decided to upload it to youtube. having their very own youtube channel obviously makes them internet superstars, and with that status comes an awesome responsibility to entertain the masses, which they take very, very seriously. so expect more excruciating nonsense to follow on the welfareloserskids channel soon! soon-ish, anyway, given the limiting factor of me figuring out how to transcode the video files to divx and then split them into youtube-friendly chunks. anyhoo. the lightning effects at the beginning of part two might be the only 20 seconds worth your time. you have been warned. proceed.
welfareloser’s rule #17: do what your doctor tells you to do
July 14, 2009 — welfarelosertoday’s the day! it’s now been six weeks since my right ulnar nerve transposition surgery. the ban on any repetitive motions or hefting over 5 lbs is officially lifted, and i can now resume normal activity – with my right hand, anyway. the left hand is still good and fucked, which precludes playing the banjo, unfortunately. i haven’t been able to play it much at all since about january, and since my hand surgeon moved to another state, i had to start over, waiting 2 months to get into the new hand surgeon’s schedule. that’s at the end of this month, and the surgery will be scheduled a week or two after that, then it’s another 6 weeks of recovery after that, so it’ll be october before i can really get back into banjo picking. fencing, on the other hand, is a go, since all i have to do with my non-weapon hand is keep it the hell out of the way.
now, other than the incision itself aching, my right arm has felt pretty good and functional for over 2 weeks. i felt like i could have started practicing with the foil again, if not actual stabbing at targets, at least point-control exercises like circling a doorknob, moving between blade positions, footwork, etc. and if i was 20, i may well have done something like that. but i’m not 20, i’m a month shy of 33. that’s middle age, and officially old enough to be scared of doing permanent damage to useful body parts.
JokerJitsu, also about my age, is in a similar position. two fucked-up knees in need of surgery; he got one torn ACL repaired about the same time i got my arm fixed, and he just got his other torn ACL repaired last week. one of these knee injuries is brand new, but the other one is about 10 years old. 10 years ago, he hurt his knee, then felt better, and went back to martial arts training, and it wasn’t right, but he didn’t worry about it, and almost subconsciously compensated for the injury. then, last winter, he blew out his other knee. he stayed off it, then it felt better, he went back to training, and he didn’t feel right… so he went to the doctor.
now, i find the activity restriction during the recovery tough; my trains-20-hours-a-week, amateur-world-champion-in-several-combat-styles friend feels like a rat in a cage. but when i asked him if he was scaring the hell out of his physical therapist, the answer was, well, of course (it’s hard not to be scared of the 6’4″ shaved-headed menace), but he was damn well following his instructions to a T. no pushing it, no testing limits, and even a hint of pain means sit the fuck down and relax. i’ve been doing the exact same thing. we admit it – we’re old. we turn the music down, drive the speed limit, and above all, we do what our doctors tell us to do. cripes, in the two weeks immediately post-surgery when i couldn’t do much more than sit in a recliner with a computer in my lap, i felt a twinge of an ache at my wrist, and immediately switched to an ergonomic trackball with a gel wristpad, and severely limited my keyboard time, as well, because FUCK carpal tunnel syndrome… not. going. there. (also, limiting my facebook scrabble playing was a good thing. i should have realized that since i was on enough narcotics that i would nod off in the middle of instant message chatting, i probably shouldn’t have been playing a bunch of scrabble. my rating dropped about 100 points in just those two weeks, and it was only this week that i got it back up. this is my brain on drugs, spelling “dog” and “the.” oops!)
so. i’ve had today circled on my calendar; i’ve REALLY been looking forward to going back to fencing tonight. last night, i picked up my practice weapon for the first time in two months. it took all of about 5 minutes of target practice for my elbow to start hurting. not because of the nerve, which is good – function and sensation are at 100%.
muscle mass, on the other hand? kinda pathetic. when the surgical wrap came off a month ago, i was amazed by how super-model skinny the whole arm was. my forearm had straight lines instead of curves and there was no discernible bicep. but, hey, that all comes back in time… a LOT of time. as i was describing to PRM how, after 4 weeks of light activity, i seem to have only gained back only 50% of the muscle that used to be there, he informed me that the rule of thumb is for every week you spend losing muscle, you have to spend 4 weeks to get it back.
now he tells me! so, yeah, i *can* stab, but without the full musculature to provide stability to the elbow, the joint hurts a bit. a good compression brace helps a lot – more than i expected, and it was only $6.95, to boot! i managed some non-stabbing practice today without any pain or instability, and i’ll probably go ahead and go to fencing tonight, but i sure as hell won’t be bouting the entire 3 hours. when it hurts, i quit. period. in fact, i’d prefer to quit before anything hurts. it’ll be another couple of months before i’m good as new. the muscle is slowly building up again. from fencing practice, from herding feral children, and most of all from housework. nothing like scrubbing the holy hell out of three bathrooms that have been neglected for months to get my ass all buff and swole again!
and i am SO okay with the wait. of all the sports-related injuries to have – and i’m realizing that virtually anyone who engages seriously in any sport goes through some version of this at least once – this one is FINE. i expect to recover fully and permanently, which is more than you can say for a lot of injuries. you blow out a knee, you may never enjoy running again. you need back surgery, it’s going to reduce the pain and increase functionality somewhat, but nowhere close to good as new.
so. in my last post of fencing pictures, i forgot to post the ones of me. so, since of course you find fencing as fascinating as i do, here you go! me and StabbiLongStocking:
i initially yelled at HappySquirrel for posting this picture of me obviously giving up a point, until StabbiLongStocking directed my attention to the scoring box. two white lights lit = two off-target hits. so i may not have retreated fast enough, and i may not have riposted accurately enough, but by god, i parried well enough!
damnit. okay. looking at these pics again has made it obvious that my stance consistently rises during panicked retreats. bad foilist. bad, bad foilist. gonna go work on keeping my stance low during retreat drills as soon as i finish this blog post.
and, finally, this is the sabre strip on the left, and the foil strip on the right, with me directing in the center. which may be what i mostly do tonight. because i am old, and i do what my doctor tells me to do.
then again, i could just play in the sabre sandbox. a sabre slash doesn’t require full extension at the elbow. and actually, being target practice for 7-foot-tall saberists doesn’t require much in the way of elbow action at all!
billy dee! billy dee!
July 12, 2009 — welfareloserover the fourth of july, we drove to our hometown to see some friends who were making their semi-annual visit from germany. driving from southeast iowa to southwest illinois means driving across rural missouri for 4 hours. there are huge differences between rural iowa and rural missouri. the former is pretty farmland sparsely populated with salt-of-the-earth types. the latter is some broke-ass land where farming may occur, in between piles of trash that may or may not be burning at any given time, sparsely populated by scary people who might well beat the shit of me for my human rights campaign bumper sticker. rural iowans consistently seem like normal, educated people who happen to live and work on farms. rural missourians, on the other hand, tend to seem more like post-apocalyptic mutants who are just waiting for a chance to steal your shoes. all kinds of fascinating nuggets at the NCES homepage, like, despite having twice the population of iowa, missouri has less than half the number of libraries.
anyway. the point is, there’s a billboard we’d never seen in iowa that stood proudly across the missouri landscape from hannibal to st louis.
i’m serious. i’m also not the only one who finds it funny enough to blog about it
so MonkeyBeef is pretty good about being stuck in the car for 5 hours, plus or minus a mcdonalds break and an “I HAVE TO GO POTTY RIGHT NOW IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE!” break. but at some point just out side st. louis proper, he apparently lost interest in practicing his rendition of “witch doctor,” and “oo-ee-oo-ah-ah” turned into balls-to-the-wall screeching and tears. i reached into what we like to call “the STFU bag,” (stocked with toys and books and junk food,) and tossed the boy his current favorite candy, a gummy krabby patty. screeching stops, plastic wrapper rattles, and then we hear him chirping “spongebob!” through a fat mouthful of chewy sugar.
PRM decided that we needed an animatronic billy dee williams in the back of the van. it would be screech-activated, dispense treats to the offending child, and then say “works every time.” then pound a colt 45 and bang an animatronic drunk woman.
anyway. SpazMonkey is still on his amateur movie-maker kick. so most of the 200 pictures from last weekend look about like this:
in fact, i was able to wrest the camera from his sticky clutches only long enough to take one, lone picture of a couple of opas and their grandsons… that i can’t find. hmm. anyway, my german friend has a boy who is two weeks younger than MonkeyBeef.
more on MonkeyBeef’s continuing language issues later; my friend’s little boy has language issues of an entirely different nature than MB’s – lots of words. in several languages. his mom is german. his dad is italian. they mostly speak english to each other. and they just moved from italy to switzerland, adding a new dialect of german, and the supremely weird romansh language, to his occasionally confused repertoire. he speaks really well, and keeps his languages separated much better than would be expected for a 2-1/2 year old. but it’s still a fertile source of lulz (as is the case any time any toddler opens his or her mouth, really.) his english has a pronounced italian accent – the song “twinkle twinkle little star” comes out “TWINKLA TWINKLA LITTLA STAR!” he knows the german word for binoculars, “fernglass.” when his opa asked him what the italian word was, he replied confidently, “fernglasso!” and he added some important words to his english vocabulary while hanging out with my kids, like “wheat thins” and “pew pew pew!”
anyway… good weekend. fireworks, barbecued pork steaks, swiss chocolate, italian wine, squirt guns, root beer floats and wings at fitz’s in university city, a stroll through the new Citygarden, 4 lbs of pregasaurus-rex impulse buying at the st louis fudge factory… and billy dee.
works every time!
follow your dream. do what you love!
July 10, 2009 — welfareloserso this is a conversation that PositiveRoleModel had with DramaQueen:
DQ: are we gonna live in this house forever?
PRM: well, no. i’m going to have this job for another 3 years, and then we’ll move.
DQ:where are we going to move to?
PRM: wherever i get my new job.
DQ: (utterly amazed) you’re gonna get a different job?
PRM: yeah.
DQ: what kind of job?
PRM: well, what kind of job do you think i should get?
(long pause)
DQ: snake fighter.
PRM: does that mean i’m a snake who fights, or a guy who fights snakes?
DQ: a guy who fights snakes!
PRM: how do i fight snakes?
DQ: you kick them. and punch them. and stomp on their heads!
PRM: sounds dangerous.
DQ: yeah! and awesome!
remeber how painfully embarrassed you were by damn near everything during preadolescense?
July 9, 2009 — welfareloserevilgremlin is soooooo there. at 9-1/2, he’s more self-aware. this means he’s more conscientious, which is great, but also more self-conscious. like all kids his age, he’s beginning to see that the world is big, and he’s trying to figure out how to angle for a good spot in it. he’s even paying attention to his looks. less than a year after he was horrified when i suggested he let his hair grow out some (“do i look like i want to be in high school musical?!?! i just want a NORMAL haircut!!!”) he started refusing haircuts; his hair now swoops carefully over his forehead, kinda skater-punkish. he chooses his clothes carefully. of course, sometimes “desert chocolate chip” and “realtree oak” constitute “matching”… but in a house where an outfit can consist of your brother’s pants (which are either 2 sizes too big or too small) a t-shirt with a picture of tom selleck that says “don’t disrespect the mustache,” a straw hat, ladybug rainboots, elbow and knee pads, and a holster made of old tae kwon do belts (for a lightsaber, watergun, or an “I CAN’T SHOW YOU IT’S NUCLEAR AND IT WILL MELT YOUR BRAINS,”) …let’s just say EG is stylin, relatively speaking.
but the biggest change is that HE IS EMBARRASSED BY EVERYTHING HIS FAMILY SAYS OR DOES. for example, we’ve been going out quite a bit lately with the other radiology residents so everyone can meet the new class. there were a couple of picnics that included kids. EvilGremlin is used to being the oldest kid by about 5 years at residency functions, so he drifted between civilized conversation with the adults, and playing frisbee with or blowing bubbles for the younger kids.
SpazMonkey had gotten a bug up his ass earlier in the day about building a time machine. so far, he had gathered various pieces of scrap wood, an old keyboard, random wires (having watched me modify xboxes and repair electronic toys, he was familiar with the need for soldering, and was still trying to convince me to tell him where i keep the soldering iron) and a “bag of plasma,” which is absolutely essential to time machine construction. plasma, in case you don’t know, is “THE OPPOSITE OF A LASER.” duh! (i un-froze one of those “polar ice” freezy bag thingies, and the resulting square breast implant was enough to delight SM.) at a picnic at DirtyMartini’s house, SM was explaining to TexasRoadKill that all he needed was “more metal parts.” TRK promptly offered him a broken lawnmower in his garage. convinced that the eventual success of his invention was now inevitable, SM proceeded to stomp up to every single person at the party (literally. every now and then he’d scan the crowd, say “HEY I HAVEN’T TALKED TO THAT GUY YET!” and go bounding over) and say some version of the following:
“HEY GUESS WHAT! I’M BUILDING A TIME MACHINE MY BROTHER AND ME ARE AND IT’S GOING TO BE FINISHED ON JANUARY THIRTY FIRST 2010 SO YOU HAVE TO COME TO MY HOUSE ON FEBRUARY FIRST 2010 SO YOU CAN GO WITH US THAT’S MONKEYBEEF’S BIRTHDAY BUT HE CAN’T COME BECAUSE HE’S TOO LITTLE AND HE MIGHT GET SCARED AND WE’RE GOING TO ILLUSION FOREST IT’S A PLACE THAT DOESN’T EXIST BUT WE’RE GOING TO GO THERE ANYWAY AND MY MOM GOT ME THE BAG OF PLASMA THAT POWERS THE TIME MACHINE WHICH IS ALSO A TRANSPORTER AND I HAVE WIRES AND POWER TOOLS AND IT HAS A PASSWORD TO TYPE IN TO TURN IT ON AND MY BIGGEST BROTHER IS BUILDING THE ROBOT AND UNCLE ROADKILL IS GIVING ME ALL THE METAL PARTS AND I AM NOT GOING TO SLEEP AND I’LL WORK ON IT ALL NIGHT IN THE BASEMENT AND IT’S GOING TO BE FREAKING AWESOME!”
one of the new residents summed up his style of speaking pretty nicely later in the week at the hookah bar:
NR: was that your oldest i was talking to?
me: i dunno. could you understand what he was saying?
NR: it was pretty stream-of-consciousness.
me: that was one of the twins, then. did he talk like he was on meth, or pot?
NR: definitely meth.
me: SpazMonkey.
of course all the adults found this absolutely adorable, even when he charged a wide-eyed 3-year-old girl (i had to tell him that she wasn’t responding to him because he was calling her “dude,” which probably didn’t do much to signal that he was talking to her) with bringing the missile launchers. because if your mission lacks missle launchers, the person in the room with pigtails is definitely the one who can hook you up!
EG did not find this adorable. he was so embarrassed he actually hid behind a tree. when i went over to ask him what was up, he sounded halfway to panicked.
EG: MOM, are you going to let him DO THAT?
me: do what?
EG: keep talking about stuff that he doesn’t know anything about!
me: dude, it’s fine. he’s just a little kid.
EG: but you can’t really build a time machine! not yet! that technology doesn’t exist yet, and they all know it!
me: it’s okay. they also know he’s just using his imagination.
EG: but i’m his big brother and they’re going to think he learned that FROM ME!
i had to explain that nobody was going to hold his brothers’ goofiness against him; if anything, i would take all the blame. it took some more talking, but once he was convinced that the mother is the one with the day-glo judgment target on her massive butt, he calmed down and was able to rejoin the party.
and all was well in PreAdolescent AngstVille until we reached the van at sundown to head home, and EG noticed the “FAILBOAT” bumper sticker that i had put on my grocery-getter after our failboat mission.
EG: oh god, mom, how long has that been there?
me: dude? MY car! (i’m as mature as any 2-year-old!)
he silently cast sidelong glances down the sidewalk in each direction, probably mentally calculating how long it would take him to walk home. then he just shook his head and got in the car, shoulders slumped, his head hanging down to let his hair cover as much of his face as possible.
yep. just wait til prom night!
random pictures
July 2, 2009 — welfareloser
yes. that is just what it looks like. watermelon covered in shredded cheese.
getting ready for bed after a long, hard day of being awesome:
biggest of the 4 fish he caught today:
okay. now. here is a 3-1/2 minute window into what my entire day sounds like (okay, at least 14 hours of it, anyway.) it has narration. and theme music. lots and lots of theme music.
SpazMonkey is really into making movies these days. i’ve taught him the rudiments of post-production editing, as well, and he’s working on captions, voice-overs, splicing, and transitions for a movie he shot a few days ago of a plush mario being attacked by some odd-looking mcdonald’s happy meal toys. he’s disappointed that i can’t teach him computer animation, because “explosions would make my movies totally sweet.” and who could argue with that?
