Atomictumor

Last night, about 3 AM, I woke up completely wide awake for various reasons:

1. My foot was itching like a son of a bitch.
2. You people were getting me all stressed out about MastaG and his freaky tattoo scar (gee, thanks)
3. I was excited about something, like a Christmas morning excited, but couldn’t remember what.

I thought maybe the excitement stemmed from a dream I had that BJ wasn’t really dead, that it was all some sort of mistake, and she was back home. Sounds harsh, but I have that dream a lot, and it doesn’t bother me anymore. I wake up happy for the opportunity to have spent a little bit more time with her, and thankful for the time I had with her. The days of me painfully missing her are over, for the past month or so, and hopefully for good, but thats not what this post is about.

No, I was thinking. I couldn’t remember what it is about today that I was excited about. It wasn’t a Friday, so I had to work. I had to figure out when to get G to the doc, which is never something I look forward to, but still, there was something I couldn’t get my fingers around.

I finally figured it out. I had bought tickets for me, the kids (along with Realtorchick’s youngest, who’s been kinda living at my house lately), and Jimmy from the Time Out Deli, to go see Transformers at 4:35 PM today.

Now, I wasn’t excited about it, other than seeing the boys’ wide eyed enthusiasm, because I kinda think I’m going to be disappointed about the movie. I mean, Michael Bay, c’mon. He can’t do Transformers.

But still, there was something deeply ingrained in me about the Autobots and Decepticons, something thats been with me longer than my wife, my kids, and some of my siblings, and I realized that I was kid-in-a-candy-store thrilled about seeing this stupid movie.

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I was Pigpens age, five years old, when I first saw the Transformers. I remember sitting in the Den of our old house in Chattanooga, the one I grew up in, before I moved out and the folks bought the Blueberry Farm, watching cartoons as was my early morning wont, when I saw the commercial. I don’t remember much about it, just sitting transfixed, with my bowl of cereal, looking at this big massive red truck turning into a bigger, massiver robot, with these sweet jet planes turning into robots and shooting at him.

Now, I loved trucks, planes, and robots. I was the target market.

I was hooked.

That Christmas, I got my first Transformers, Cliffjumper and Thundercracker. The Biscuit (Dad) and I worked for 30 minutes to get Thundercracker, one of those sweet planes, transformed into its robot mode, and man, lemme tell you, it was 30 of the best minutes of my life.

The Transformers cartoon show started around that time, and I was absorbed into the stark desert landscape that the Autobots rolled around in, protecting power plants and whatnot from Megatron and the Decepticons and their evil schemes to transform all this stuff into glittery energon cubes so they could do something with them that I didn’t really comprehend (world conquest, or something, hell, I dunno… they were freakin Transformers man, who cares!)

The next Christmas, about all I wanted were Transformers. I was the target market.

I prayed, begged, whined, cajoled, whimpered, and schemed to get Omega Supreme. As the name implies, he was the end all/be all of Transformery excess in the winter of 1985 (or was it 84?). He cost $50. I went to K-mart frequently to look at the massive box, drooling at the awesome mural image of Transformers in space, blasting each other. I read the little stats for him printed on the box, with the maxed out firepower and strength rating, and hyperventilated on the few occasions Omega Supreme appeared on the cartoon.

Problem was, there wasn’t a whole lot of money going around growing up, and I knew he was too expensive. Still, I prayed, and hoped, and begged.

I opened my presents that Christmas Eve, and he wasn’t there. That night tho, I snuck over to see what Santa dropped off (again, as is my childhood wont), and damned if Omega wasn’t sitting there, out of the box, in robot mode, big massive gun hand pointing right at me.

It was the happiest day of my young life.

Time went on, and in the summer of 1986 the Transformers animated movie came out. The ads would come on TV, and I’d be transfixed, taking in all the awesome. The colors were brighter than the show, the explosions were more explody, the robots were shiner. There were new robots, and rumors of huge changes to the Transformers pantheon!

I never saw that movie in the theaters. I heard, tho, as time went on, that Optimus Prime, that mighty red truck, the leader of the Autobots, the savior of little boys, died that summer.

Man, I tell you what, that hit me hard. I was afraid to admit it, because who wants to admit that they’re crying over a cartoon, but I had a hard time. That summer, my favorite teacher moved away (she taught the gifted class at Mountain Creek Elementary), and my cousins friend, who I had met a time or two in South Carolina, died in an automobile accident. The three things combined, and weighted my little 3rd grade heart down.

But I really think it was Optimus that did it. He was a hero to the target market. He was a massive truck, who turned into a massiver robot, who’d get down and play basketball with orphan kids. He cared about all of these little puny creatures on Earth, and died defending them. Wired called him the father to a generation of latchkey kids. I don’t think I’d go quite that far, but then I had a Dad, and wasn’t necessarily a latchkey kid.

I was just in the target market, and he was the hero.

So, today, at 29, in 2007, 21 years after he died the first time, I’m excited about seeing him. Bay may well screw it up, but I’m not expecting much, except to maybe see my boys have the enthusiasm and happiness that I had at their age, with a bowl of cereal, and a badass robot.

Here at The Cemestos Gardens we’ve had quite a few prescriptions filled lately for a variety of ailments . Everything from earlobes to teeth and lungs to rashy skin have garnered a medicine. I hope we’re through with the meds for a while. I figure the less pharmaceutical, the better.

I was briefly surprised to learn from this NPR story that pharmacies and pharmaceutical companies are in cohoots by making money off the information created by my Doc and I. The arraingment goes something like this. After I walk away with my little white bag of meds, the pharmacy puts together what med my doc just prescribed minus my idenity. The pharmacy then sells this little bundle to the pharmaceutical company. The big company learns from this info what drugs a doctor prescribes, thus allowing their sales folk to better pitch product.

I don’t know what to make of this, except that you can make a buck off anything you can gather info from. I’m not making the bucks though and I don’t think this makes for a better health-care system. You?

This is my almost-sad camera story.

Last week, as I was leaving work, our camera wiggled out of its case and hit the cold, hard concrete sidewalk. I scooped it up, took a quick photo to test its function, and all seemed well. However, when I got it home, I noticed that it had a small battle wound and that the shutter button was now in a constant state of semi-depressed - meaning that it was going nutty trying to auto-focus on everything. (Geez, that sounds like me sometimes). When I tried to take some additional test photos, I found that none of the setting or function buttons worked. I couldn’t control the flash, the macro feature, anything. The camera was gimpy, and was taking gimpy photos.

We’ve had our camera for a little over three years, and it has been one of my favorite purchases ever. It’s been with us during family vacations, birthdays, and took the first photos of both Lugnut and Wingnut shortly after their births. Needless to say, I was pretty sad about what happened. But, you know, behind every broken item is the opportunity to consume, consume, consume.

So, even though the last thing we need right now is the expense of a new camera, Bos and I found ourselves perusing the ‘net last night to see what shiny new things we could find. Now Bos had heard about one in particular a few weeks back - the Nikon D40. Evidently, the good (marketing) folks at Nikon gave out 200 of these to residents of Georgetown, South Carolina and instructed them to take pictures, which Nikon is now using in the D40 marketing campaign. Pretty smart.

Marketing campaign aside, I like this camera. It gets solid reviews at CNET, Consumer Reports and several other places. It’s a digital SLR, which, despite my attachment to the current camera, I’ve been wanting for quite a while. And as far as digital SLRs go, it comes at a good price. A good enough price for me to become very tempted at hooking myself up with one.

I mean, come on, how am I going to take decent pictures if I have no control over something as simple as the flash?

I woke up this morning with a serious case of I-wanna-new-camera. I price-shopped a little bit, found some stores in Knoxville that carry the D40 so we could go see it in person. Touch it. Caress it. Oh yeah, I’ve got it bad.

I decided that my Camera Shy photo today should be of the current camera, so I got it out, put it next to the mirror and was going to attempt to take a picture without any of those handy setting and function features.

And you know what? I think I must have scared it into behaving, because this morning, all the buttons worked.

I’m glad it’s working again. Really, I am. But I’m left with the consumeristic momentum that builds when you shop around for something new and shiny. Where do I go with that?

Now that the day has come and passed, I’m fairly confident we can talk about it without fear of retaliation.

Apparently, now, I did something to piss yesterday off.  Maybe I ding its car, and didn’t realize it, but it was out to get me with a myriad of little things.

I decided, around 4 PM, to fight back, by going TV shopping.  Ah yes, that’ll straighten it out.  My plan was to go out and get something to pretty much directly replace the cherished GE 27 incher that has adorned some section of our house since BJ and I got married many moons ago.

As happens when one goes shopping (or, when I go shopping), I quickly decided that a direct replacement is not the wisest choice.  I started thinking ‘What would Ghandi do?  What would Franklin do?  What would Camus do?”

They’d get an LCD.  Or at least, thats what they told me.

So I drove, and drove.  I went to HH Gregg, where I found an open box “Spectroniq” 32 inch LCD TV for $488, but was a bit leery.  I drove on, to Target, where I found a 37 inch one for $688, but kept driving.  I went to Walmart, where I found, well, nothing.  Then I went to Best Buy and Circuit City, which were a total waste of time.

In between that time, now, I had a lovely dinner with the Cemesto’s gang, and had a moment of clarity, during which I wrote this text message:

“In the bthrm at mello mushrm waitn on
pigpen, Freebird on. Pull my hair back w my
hands, look in the mirror, my mulleted self
lookin back.
Bird u cant change.”

I sent that to the sidebar, in keeping with the mulleted conversations of late, but, it was the grim Wednesday, and it never got posted.  Twittr is apparently not working very well for me, several of my texts disappear like that.  Need to find a solution to that before Bonnaroo.’

So, anyway, after dinner we drove back to HH Gregg to get the open box TV, after finding some decent reviews of it, but damned if there isn’t somebody sitting in the “buyer’s chair” with that thing in a box behind him.

So, I bought the one at Target.  I signed up for their dumb little credit card to get 10 percent off my order, and got the 3 year warranty.

I was feeling pretty good about myself.  This TV is way better than I need, and I haven’t completely wasted money in quite a while.  While the ghost of GAC wasn’t exactly patting my back, neither did I feel her ghostly fingers trying to choke the life out of me for wasting money. MastaG was confident, however, that she’d approve, while strangling me.  He’s one for contradictions, that boy.

So, I get the TV on the buggy, the dude’s bringing it out front, I swing my car around, and…

Damn thing doesn’t fit.

Grim Wednesday has struck again.

So, I drove home, defeated,  but it occurred to me coming home that I’ve been getting so angry lately at little things, as I’m sure comes through in my posts.  I mean, I’ve always been snarky, and somewhat aggressive, but rarely angry.  Thats changed, and I want to get myself back to the way I used to be.

Pigpen had another solution:

“We need to get a smaller TV, Dad.”

I see over in the shout box that I’m one half the reason for the sucky nature of the intarwebs today. I have to disagree as I think it’s a conspiracy on the part of the foul force that slayed our twenty year old washing machine. What lowlife would kick such an elderly machine? It’s wrong, so wrong.

Really, I think the machine gave up the ghost after the second load of cloth diapers because it saw the writing on the wall. It realized the loads and loads of crappy laundry in its future spelled the end of its leisurely existence. So it fell on its own agitator cycle and died.

The new washing machine is supposed to be delivered sometime between 11am and 3pm tomorrow. We should have it by eight that evening.