The Grinning Geek

It rained a bit last night, was cloudy all day, and really started coming down this evening. Understand, that rain is wonderful and when you live in a city that has over 300 days of sunshine a year, a little rain now and again is a very welcome sight. My entire well-being is based on being to pump water that comes from hundreds, if not thousands of miles away from me in to my house. When it falls from the sky, I am pretty happy with this.

But people in Arizona -really- can’t handle rain. Admittedly, we’re not a city built for rain. Sure, we have storm drains and run off and all of that – but the ground dries in to a solid brick in the sun and (ironically I know) the desert can’t absorb the rain. I am telling you all of this, because it’s important to realize that as a rare event, playing outside in the rain was something my brother and I enjoyed as a rare treat.

One of the great advantages to Phoenix is of course, that it’s rare we have “cold rain”. Even during the winter it may be 60 degrees outside while raining, so my mother rarely used the idle threat of “come inside or you will catch cold” as an excuse to get us to stop playing in the rain. More often than not, she’d just get mad since we’d come in and tromp water and mud throughout the house. So, unrestrained by vague claims of death by respratory ailment brought on by exposure to cold damp air, we’d go play. On our street, the curbs were a bump, and several layers of blacktop covered the street itself. This created a nice channel that ran down the gutter, where water could flow. Living on a cul-de-sac we did not get a lot of traffic, and living on a mountain the water had a rather rapid flow down the street. This presented the perfect river for my brother to play out our civil and structural engineering fantasies by attempting to dam off this mini river and ensuring that the millions of citizens down stream (they must have lived in the flood plane by the grumpy old man’s house or something) did not get killed in a raging torrent of water, leaves, sticks, and gravel brought on by the water washing in to the gutter. Of course, while real dams are made of concrete and rebar, we were operating on a budget here so we used the only building material that made sense: rocks.

Now I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that, since I live in a desert, I have an ample supply of rocks available to me with which to build the dam, and while this is technically true, I would have had to go to the mountain to get them, load them in our red wagon, haul them down the street to some kind of staging area on the sidewalk where they would then be inserted one by one in to our makeshift dam. This represented an extreme amount of work and planning, and frankly, did not sound like much fun, so we used the next best thing which of course was gravel from my parent’s front yard.

So, relatively unsupervised, my brother and I would take handfuls and handfuls of gravel from my parents yard, dumping it in to the gutter in the street in a failing attempt to block the flow of the “river” and save the helpless towns people below. Of course, what I did not know at the time was that you can’t really block the flow of water forever, and that some must be released in a controlled manner to avoid overflowing the dam, or in our case, just re-directing the water further out in to the street. This was unfortunate, but not something that would so easily defeat the Miller Boys so we got more gravel, extending our wonder of modern engineering further out in to the street. Once again, the water would simply go around the dam, further out in to the street. Once again, our dam simply needed to be expanded to block this flow of water.

Normally, this would be bad, but had I the foresight and deviousness I now possess as a 30 year old man, I likely could have performed this little model of construction, put the rocks back in the yard when we were done, my father would have been none the wiser and I could go on living a nice peaceful life, never giving another thought to the millions who died, living downstream, in the great flood caused when I removed the dam.

But of course the rain stopped, which means the water stopped flowing and Max and I got bored so we moved on. And we left the rocks, and our rock dam, extending halfway out in to the street as if we had somehow given up our roles as dam builders and became civil engineers in charge of traffic flow and felt we needed to install half a speed bump in front of our house.

Made of my dad’s rocks.

Suffice to say, when he got home and saw a large portion of his yard no longer in his yard, but instead arranged in an artfully crafted, though doomed from the start dam he was a little tense and expressed his displeasure with his two sons, who then had to go out and shovel the rocks back in to the yard as they should have done in the first place.

I love it when it rains in Phoenix.

-J

So I switched to IE8, and that’s why I haven’t posted in awhile.

What?

Well, I use the bookmark in my bookmark toolbar in Chrome and Firefox to remind me to post. The bookmark toolbar in IE is older, and while it has some of my links it doesn’t have this one so I forgot to post. I am a tool. I am sorry about that. So let’s get back to it, shall we? I’ve been thinking about some random things lately, I wanted to put down.

First, I watched Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey with my wife the other day. Or rather, I should say, I was watching Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey and my wife came in and watched it with me. The conversation went something like this:

Diana: “What’re you watching?”
Me: “Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey.”
Diana: “Where are they?”
Me: “Hell.”
Diana: “Why?”
Me: “They are dead. It’s part of the bogus journey.”
Diana: “Are they playing Battleship?”
Me: “Yes.”
Diana: “Why?”
Me: “They are trying to beat death.”
Diana: “Are they playing twister now?”
Me: “Yes.”
Diana: “You watch weird shows.”

A few minutes later, two large aliens with very exposed alien butts are on the TV. Those who are in the know, realize this is Station – the greatest scientific mind in the Universe.

Diana: “You watch really weird shows.”

So that was my wife’s introduction to Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey.

Now to randomly switch topics, I’ve been plotting out a new tabletop campaign I want to run. This will likely be played via text like on a MUSH or something, because this is going to be more of a story than a series of dice rolls. I am specifically writing it to trick and confuse the players. It’s going to be for more veteran RPers, one’s who I think can keep up and roll with the punches I throw at them. I need about 2 more players, so we’ll see what I can dig up. I am excited though, I’ve been carrying around a notebook with me and jotting down little notes here and there with stuff I want to be sure to include. I think it’s either going to be really awesome or fall flat on it’s face.

On that note, I have some more to say about school and Star Trek online, but Word Press is doing something odd and I don’t want to lose this so I’ll write it this afternoon.

-J