I posted this to marco-pirroni.co.uk on Aug 25, 2003.

2 week vacation hightlights.
36 hour Amtrak ride from St. Paul, Minnesota to Pasco, Washington, with my husband and two small children, uneventful except for passing some raging brush-fires we passed right by, in Eastern Washington State. All that's between Minnesota and Washington, was mostly dirt, dry, desert, except for the beautiful Glacier National Park in Western Montana. Very scenic with its mountains and evergreen trees.

Our train seats were recliners, we slept in them.

Spent 7 whole days with my parents, in my home town of Yakima, Washington. Both 59 years old, still married after 40 years...merely living in entirely separate sections of the house, as are most of the still-married parents of most of my other friends my age. 5 of my 6 brothers and sisters still live in town, in fact 2 of them are back living with my parents. One brought his wife back with him. So they were all 5 in and out of the house, with or without spouses, at any hour of day or night, with all their children, as well as the 4 of us, visiting, and my 2 parents.

I was sorry to find that the two siblings I have who have NOT been diagnosed with mental illness, compensated by marrying spouses who MUST BE, including this brother in law who is wearing this same shirt in all his pictures I came back with...



In case you can't tell, it is a picture of a guy getting a blowjob by a fish.

I attended my 20 year high school reunion. It was great for me to see so many people again after 20 years! Especially my best friends from that time, who used to hang out with me & listen to the B-52's, Devo, and the Police. Me and two other girls were voted "least changed." The other two really did look like they were still 18, and had been frozen in time since June 1983, but I really have no idea what I was doing up there with them.

I took my kids up Mt. St. Helens. They're bored by my reminding them I lived 80 miles downwind of it when it errupted in 1980 when I was 15, and our whole town was covered in ash. Ho-hum, volcano stories from old people.

[img]http://hometown.aol.com/kackythope1/images/mtsthelens.jpg[\img]
I am holding my son, my daughter is sitting on the sign, and my sister is wearing the black "Patrick" tee shirit. You can see what's left of the volcano, behind my daughter's head.

I drove the 4 of us plus my mom to visit my 6th sibling, in a neighboring town, in the "Adult Residential Treatment Facility" to which the State of Washington has committed him. He's so drugged up it was like visiting Forrest Gump. When I talked to him on the phone before we visited he said, "I'MSOEXCITEDTOTALKTOYOUMYMOUTHJUSTDRIEDALLTHEWAYOUTANDMYTOUNGEHASSWOLLENUPTO4TIMESITSNORMALSIZE!"

I've never eaten out at so much fast food restaurants so many times in 7 days, in my whole life.

36 hour train ride back. Came within 20 miles of a forest fire in Western Montana, we could smell the s'moke (intentionally misspelled to avoid the emoticon) from inside the train, & see the fog out the window. Immigration boarded our train car as I was sleeping, and took the Spanish-speaking lady, seated directly behind me, away in a van!!

OK I charged the Amtrak tickets. We never did receive any checks from that supposed child tax refund program. And our neighbor with 6 children says she only received thirty four dollars total, instead of the 400 per child that the newspaper keeps saying everyone is going to get!
Tuesday night at 11:15 we get on an Amtrak train and ride for about 36 hours to Pasco Washington. How we'll get from Pasco to Yakima, no one knows. Probably rent a car.
We'll be at my mom & dad's for a week, leaving the following week on Wednesday night. Of course, staying at my parents' usually meant carving out a niche in the clutter and ducking out periodically to eat at Burger King a lot .
I'm glad we're going. Last time my parents saw my 9 year old daughter, she was 3, and they've never seen my 4 year old son at all.
And my kids will get to ride on a train & see the Pacific Northwest the whole way!

At my desk, at work, it's 1/2 hour past when I was officially back from my lunch. I spent all lunch figuring out mixedrace.com does not really allow remote-linking of avatars. I loaded 2 small pictures of myself, scanned yesterday, to my mixedrace.com web site, then remote-linked to them from 2 different discussion lists I'm on. In each case one minute you look at my post on the discussion lists, you can see my picture, then later come back and you just see a red x.
I need to find a new host site for avatars and remote picture linking, and it needs to be a free one.
And I'm too vain to ask everyone else for help. I can see in the "properties" of their photos that they all have some obscure site that they're probably paying for, to host thier scanned photographs for that purpose.
I'll find a way around this.
I got to keep on top of what ever play-technology today's average 12 year old can figure out, because 10 years from now marketable technology will be based on that underlying programming logic, and I will be competing with that same former 12-year-old for my job.
Love Kathy

Jargon Spewing Corprate Zombie.

I've been looking in on marco-pirroni.co.uk and adam-ant.net quite a lot lately, chatting to cool people over those forums. Love Marco. Sorry Adam's ill.

Still work 6 am - 3 pm M-F and the occasional Saturday, at the software company. But am significanly less motivated than I used to be. About a month ago, we had a meeting in which it was explained to us by some executive that all the executives received their corporate-goal-reaching bonuses anyway, even though we as a corpopration only met 80% of our annual goal. Because of course we want to retain them, we wouldn't want to lose their excellent leadership. Meanwhile there is a 4% raise-cap this year for everyone else, and to get it you'll still have to meet your manager's expectations (apparently not just 80% of them) . Because of course we wouldn't want to be like all those other software companies that gave all their staff huge raises and then had to declare bankruptcy and lay all those people off. Just a few weeks earlier we all got an email saying that in order to save money, our reception area would no longer be subscribing to any magazines, so would we please bring magazines from home, so that our customers and guests will have something to read while they're waiting? Which of my magazine back-issue collection do you think I should bring in: Phsychotronic Video; Giant Robot; or Bitch Magazine? Anyway I'm putting in as little effort as possible these days and checking the internet a lot, because I think our networking dept is just as understaffed as we are, and probably has better things to do than to check up on me.

Plus they still won't hire my friend Jeff who would be perfect, so I hate them right now.

I have been in total dental agony all summer, and have just returned from my 6th dental appointment in about 2 months. Hopefully it will be my last until January. Now I have two new fillings and a crown. I will get another crown on another tooth in January. Ive already met my dental annual max this year, so that other tooth will have to wait until the year starts over.

I'm also freaking out because my husband and 2 children are planning to visit my parents next week, which means getting all 4 of us from Minnesota to Washington State, somehow, and back again. My husband and I have asked off 2 weeks from work, for the trip. But I'm depending on the George Bush child care credit tax refund, which I object to on principal, but will use anyway, for this trip. I vote for Greyhound because it will be cheaper, but my husband votes for Amtrak, which would BREAK US, but he's such a comfort-baby. We still dont' have someone to take our dog, and will probably pay to have her kept in a local professional kennel.

It will be my 20 year high school reunion! I still love my old high school friends so much! But some of them are still so bitter about high school, and about something that happened at the 10-year reunion, that some of them have said they'll come to town to see me, but they're not going to the official reunion at the hotel on Saturday, or to the picnic the next day. Sometimes I still miss sitting in each others' basements & bedrooms, listening to Devo, the B-52' s and the Police, on vinyl and cassette.

Marco Pirroni posts messages to Marco-Pirroni.co.uk all the time, and recommended a fascinating book called "Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music" by Irwin Chasid. So I got it and my husband and I are both completly obsessed with it now. Here is a quote from the Wild Man Fischer chapter, that has just haunted me, " When you're immersed in alternative, post-glitter, underground punk culture, there's humor about certain things that aren't actually funny." This was in reference to an artist who really was mentally ill and a danger to himeself and others.

Love Kathy