ch3lk

"ASK YOUR MOM"

2009-01-26T10:31:00.000-08:00

Best fortune from a cookie. Ever.

I Heard My Kids Say...

2007-12-20T10:28:00.000-08:00

As a way to record the funnier things I've been fortunate enough to overhear my children say, I'm writing them here, the first in what I'm sure will be a series. Hopefully I'm not being one of those parents who think every banal utterance is golden wisdom and that these are just funny no matter who said them.

So without further ado...

"Down with hillbillies!"

"...because aliens do talk."
"They just sound funny?"

"Adriana looks so goth"

"Can hobos learn karate?"

"I wonder if hillbillies are afraid of gorillas."

"You got a lot of black shirts."
(me)"What do you think about that?"
"Sounds goth"

"There are Germans on the loose!"

"The darkness contains the beast."

"Come here, birdie. Taste Yoshi breath!"

###

Took You Long Enough

2007-11-14T18:08:00.000-08:00

Yes, it did but I'm finally putting up picture's of Ellie's pumpkin which I thought was pretty creative. So without any further ado...

"Happy Halloween, Ladies!"

2007-10-31T12:05:00.000-07:00

Which is, of course, a quote said by The Kurgan

Is it strange that I am uplifted by The Fountain and utterly depressed by Knocked Up? I'm not sure what this portents but I am feeling very much a tribe of one today.

My parents have left and oddly the house feels quite empty. If they had stayed this long at my old apartment for as long as they stayed here I probably would have jumped through a window. But since I have several spaces I could get some alone time when I needed it, their visit was very nice. While they were here I got to get some of the Seattle touristy stuff out of the way such as Pike Place Market the Seattle Center. While at the Center I saw the following up close and personal:

Of course I'm talking about the costumes

not the actual people. We went to the Science Fiction Museum which was a bit of a let down aside from seeing the above Bladerunner stuff (which was double weird as I had just seen Bladerunner: Final Cut while in LA the weekend before). HOWEVER, next door and included in our admission fee was the Experience Music Project which totally kicked ass. They had a quite extensive history of Hip Hop exhibit where I saw Grandmaster Flash's actual turntables and Run DMC's Addidas and a few promo copies of some Sugar Hill Gang singles (which I would have traded my mother right then and there to have) and other fun stuff. There was a history of the guitar exhibit, a bit on the bands from the NW (which surprised me to learn how many bands come from up here and I'm not talking about grunge), as well as a whole floor with actual musical instruments and jam rooms for kids (and kids at heart) to play and learn including some dj setups to learn beat matching and scratching. I guess people are recognizing that DJing is an actual art and it's about damn time.

Liam is playing the part of TMNT Raphael today, and Ellie, despite having strep throat, is a she devil thingy and carved a wonderful pumpkin of which I shall post some photos tomorrow.

Oh, and if anyone wants to take a 3 day weekend Delta is having $99 each way from LA to Seattle this weekend. Just saying is all.

The Horror

2007-10-10T09:30:00.000-07:00

Last night I taught my mom how to play Super Mario Sunshine...

Dreams

2007-10-04T11:11:00.000-07:00

Seems I'm not the only one who had a fit of dreaming last night but here's mine. Let me put a penny in the cinematograph...

In order to bolster the nation's deficit, George Bush decided to put America up for sale on the internet. You would go to a site that had a Google Maps-like interface where you could scroll around and zoom in and out. The country was divided into parcels of varying size depending on how dense with general stuff the land was. So you could get a large swath of land up in Montana and in LA it could get as small as say a ramp in front of a building. If the parcel wasn't already colored (i.e. bought) you could click on it and the parcel's color would be updated with your color and it would be added to your shopping cart. You could continue shopping and when you were ready you could check out a la Amazon. You didn't actually own the land or even had naming rights. It was just a bragging rights sort of thing. You could order a plaque or sign that said stuff like "Chuck's Ramp" and it could be placed on your ramp but that was about it. Of course, it sold like hot cakes.

On the way home from buying my bits of land (what computer was I on doing all this shopping if not my home computer? oh dreams), I walked into a stadium where a man was giving a seminar on prudent investment strategies like the kind late night infomercials advertize. The audience was comprised of about 90% ROTC cadets and 10% John Deer employees. So looking across the audience I saw mostly snappy uniforms and a small clump of plaid, flannel shirts and green, trucker caps.

The adventure continues...

Some time later I am at work at the lumber yard filling orders of our most popular product which was a sheet of particle board about 4'x4'x1/2" and its official product name was Max Plank.

I Live in a Suitcase

2007-10-01T10:43:00.000-07:00

Well it's October and while some may be looking up, I am not. Because of my Libra birthday, October is generally the month for me to take stock of my life. And the truth is, I have a good life with children that fill me with wonder and friends that fill me with awe and no one to share all that with. So, I'm back to Thomas Dolby's "I Live in a Suitcase" which, despite what you might think, has nothing to do with me recently moving. For those who aren't familiar with the song, I will now reprint it without anyone's permission:

When all the lights go down
This dirty desert town
Is theatre in the round
with stars instead of a crowd
I came here the hard way
And now I'm living in a suitcase
And I came here the hard way
And now I'm living in a suitcase
In a suitcase
I live in a suitcase
I live in a suitcase
Marked Rome
Marked Los Angeles
So I made, I made a home
Here inside of me
Here inside me

When all that's to be said's been said
What's keeping you in bed
Is a fear inside your head
The fear of being misled
You came here the hard way
And now you're living in a suitcase
And I came here the hard way
And now I'm living in a suitcase
In a suitcase
I live in a suitcase
I live in a suitcase
But oh little ingenue
I need, I need to know you will be here too
Then I'll make my home here inside of you
And not in a suitcase
And not in a suitcase

They say travel broadens the mind
So I went over the falls in a barrel
I found the north pole
In a field of ice
And in a land of dreams
I found you

I live in a suitcase
I live in a suitcase
I live in a suitcase
I live in a suitcase
Don't want to live in a suitcase
I live in a suitcase
Don't want to live in a suitcase
I live in a suitcase
I'm living in a suitcase

...

sigh

Garmonbozia!

2007-09-27T10:01:00.000-07:00

I have related this to some but I wanted to share with the rest of the world. I'd like to think that the spirit of David Lynch was speaking to me saying this house was just weird enough to be home. You be the judge.

I met my landlady the first day I was here to go over the new house and sign off on everything. You know, the usual. Through the course of looking around we went into the garage. I knew I, indeed, found the right house when I looked on a bit of shelving and saw...

That's right. Your eyes do not deceive you and neither do I. Those are cans of creamed corn. 16 cans of creamed corn to be exact. The fact that there are 16 of them is overshadowed by the fact that if you'll notice, they aren't all the same type of can. About half are the regular can size and the other half are the squat, fatter kind of cans.

Let's all take a moment of silence and ponder this discovery...

...

WHAT THE HELL?!?

Maybe the previous tenants would go to the store periodically and one of them would say, "I can't remember, are we out of creamed corn?"

"Dunno, better buy a couple cans just in case."

And upon returning to their home, "Oh right, we already had some."

"Well, you can never have too much creamed corn I always say."

"You do always say that."

Maybe they were the neighborhood hard luck case and received gifts from the local canned food drives and thought it was bad luck to eat or throw away the cans of creamed corn.

Maybe they bought a can of creamed corn for their mutant daughter every year for her birthday until, on her sixteenth birthday, she broke free from her chains in the crawlspace and escaped and that's who I hear howling in the dead of night.

The possibilities are endless. The probabilities are unknown.

Re-Start

2007-09-21T21:10:00.000-07:00

It's up and running, this new chuckskelton.com of mine. It's not entirely finished and hopefully more stuff will come online in the coming weeks but...

let's just start with what we have, shall we?