Fishing and Barbecue

I had completely forgotten about Frank's party last night. Right after work though, maybe 6 guys from work went over to his new place and had a barbecue. It was a good time, and I had (again) a little too much to drink.

Since I didn't have anyone to go home to, when I got tired on the road, I just pulled into a "Park and Ride" and took a nap for an hour. This definitely helped out. I was pretty tired. When I got home (at like 10:30) I just hit the sack.

I did note that on my answering machine, Lord's Solider had left a message. He's the leader of our online gaming clan, and has most likely heard (somehow) that my wife and I are getting divorced. He left his number, so I should give him a call tonight. We'll see if I remember =p

On Saturday, I mowed my lawn in the hot and humid weather, and cleaned house. On Sunday, I went hiking in the morning by myself (unfortunately I didn't hook up with Jen, though she and her sister did get out for a hike later in the day) and then at 12:30 headed down to Stamford to meet up with Brad & Srini. We hung out for a while and around 5 went on on the water between Stamford and Long Island for some fishing with a friend of Brad's. We didn't catch any fish, but we had a good time.

After that, we got some Chinese and watched a movie (Joe Dirt) at Brad's place, and then I headed home.

Got my AA Punkbuster working!

Context - Migrated from my /. journal:

I run gentoo on my machine at home, a good gaming rig. I believe I used the gentoo ebuild from portage to install Americas Army 2.10 on it. But I kept on getting kicked off of servers! My punkbuster was what was causing it, but when I tried to update it via pbweb.x86, I kept on getting a message saying that it couldn't do a binary conversion.

See, what happens is in /opt/americas-army AA gets installed, and in ./System/pb the punkbuster stuff is held. You put pbweb.x86 in there, chmod and run it, and you should be ok. Only no dice.

So after some extensive investigation, I come to find that I'm (a) missing a directory in ./System/pb called "dll", which I assume is what was causing the binary conversion problem.

Also, unbeknownst to me, ~/.armyops210 (or something like that) was created, a directory. In there I found System/pb as well, only this one had the "dll" directory. I ran pbweb.x86 in there and was all set. Volia! I was able to play.

I didn't bother to try creating the "dll" directory in /opt/.../pb, but I imagine if I did that the binary conversion would have worked as well. What I'm dubious about is if the pb is being taken from there or from my home directory. I may experiment, if I can remember to.

Camping

On the bright side, this weekend I was able to actually go camping with my family. On Friday night we were in New Hampshire, at Russel Lake off of Exit 31 on I-93 North.

My wife, daughter and I set up camp at an outstanding camp site: secluded from most of the others, but still on the main road. The site was level, mostly sand, and had a picnic table and firepit (complete with grill). At around 10ish we were cooking dinner (after coming home from a concert at Loon Mountain) when a park attendant called down to us from his golf-cart on the road.

"Do you have any food out?"
"Yes, we're cooking dinner."
"Well, best put out and extra plate. There are black bears above and below you. You can expect a visitor tonight if you've got food out."
"Ok. Thanks!" came our tremulous reply.

I still continued to cook the food we had out. Brauts on the grill for my wife, leftovers for myself, and a couple of hot-dogs for Audrial. My wife and daughter retired early that evening, her with a sleeping pill to assist her sleep, and Audrial telling her a story about a beautiful princess named Rosalind.

It's funny how kids do that. I used to tell her bed time stories at night, when I was too tired to open or read a book. Sleepily I'd tell her about a beautiful princess named Audrial, and her adventures with woodland animals. And now she comforts my wife, and makes her feel beautiful and loved in her small way, just by adapting the stories I'd told her and giving it her own 4-year-old-wanting-to-be-a-teenager elements.

After they had gone to tent, I sat alone before the campfire and ate the braut I had cooked for myself. I sat watching the fire in the darkness, warming my feet. Occasionally I would take out a small flashlight and shine it ino the woods, just to see if I had any silent visitors. After some time, my wife called to me, telling me that her sleeping pill wasn't working. She asked me to read her to sleep, and I suggested that when I came to bed shortly, I would bring my audio book on my Palm Zire 72, which had a small but clear speaker which would be easy to hear in the silence of the forest night. She jumped at the idea, and once I had finished cleaning up the campsite, I brought it in the tent and set it on. Within 5 minutes, she was fast asleep, snoring softly, as was my daughter.

So I turned off the story and closed my eyes.

The next morning, I was awakened in near dawn. The sky was overcast, but it didn't rain during the night. When I awoke, I thought I heard something large moving off to the left of the tent. But I didn't hear anything more, even though my senses were keenly aware due to the possibility that there could be a bear within 15 feet of me.

I closed my eyes and awoke later when the light was more full in the sky. I stepped quietly out of the tent and strode over to the firepit. The fire I had left burning when I went to sleep last night was only ashes and the remenants of logs. I used those remenants as a base and made a new fire. My wife had used all of the starter material we had purchased the day before, and when I checked my backpack in the van I found that there was none in there either, save for my emergency supplies.

I took one of the paper plates we'd purchased and rolled it in a tube, lit one end with a lighter and placed it below the logs I'd placed on the fire. It burned, the fire took, and blazed for a little while. But when I moved the logs a bit, the flames died out and all I had was embers. So I used another paper plate, and now the flame started blazing in ernest. Before long I had a very good fire going, and I stared at it for a long time in that early morning, alone with my thoughts.

Eventually I got lonely and bored, and decided to wake my daughter up. When I told her I had a fire going, she was all ready to wake up. She came outside and sat by the fire with me and played with her dolls. I cooked the rest of the brauts and we ate breakfast together. When my wife woke up, we all went swimming. I let my daughter drive on my lap. She tried to steer us into the woods a couple of times, but mostly did a good job.

The water of the pond was clear, clean, and refreshing. The taste of it reminded me of Newfound Lake, which I grew up swimming on during the summers. We had a camp there, and I spent many days their in my youth. This large pond would likely be called a lake down here in Connecticut. The sandy bottom was nice, and within perhaps 50 feet it got to be over your head, just slightly. We all enjoyed our time there.

But too soon we were called to leave, and went back to the campsite. I cleaned it up mostly by myself, because my wife was feeling unwell. And with that, out camping adventure ended.

Calamity

I can recall this somewhat clearly: I had a desire to take the door off of the hinges. Our apartment had a relatively large living room, and a kitchen offset by the door to the hallway. Our bedroom was seperated from the livingroom by a door, but the door swung inward into the bedroom, and often clanged with the door of the bathroom, which also swung into the bedroom. So one night, I took the bedroom door off of it's hinges.

The next day, my wife was complaining that she was hurting inside, so she took a bath to see if that would help. Before I knew what was happening, she told me to call 911, and after a little questioning I did just that. They removed her from the bath and put her on a strecher, which could have only been accomplished with that door of the hinges. And they took her to the hospital.

The problem, I was told, was that she needed to have her gall-bladder removed. That was removed, by due to the incompetence of the hospital staff, my wife got a blood clot in her chest. They treated it as best they could, and eventually she was let home with medication to take regularly.

One day months later while we were visiting with my parents in NH, she started having trouble with her blood clot. We took her to the hospital, and after some investigation they took her across the state to Dartmouth Hositpal, where she was treated by one of the countries experts in these matters. She was in the hospital for like 3 to 6 months, during which she was essentially tortured by the treatments she underwent. She had repeated angioplasty, during which something like a balloon is scraped along the insides of her veins in an effort to clear them. She was kept drugged most of the time, yet even drugged the pain was excruciating during those angioplasty sessions.

But for me, life had to go on. I had to work at my job, and come home to an empty house at night. My parents had offered to watch my daughter until my wife came home, which was quite kind of them. Every weekend I took the beater I was driving (our only car at the time, since the lease on my wife's truck from Colorado had expired) up the New Hampshire and back again. I stayed at my parents house, had some face time with my daughter, and visited my wife. I probably put on maybe 600 miles with each one of those weekend trips, and as the weeks turned into months my wife was still in the hospital, I was still working my job and coming home to nothing at night.

Finally, she was released and our family was back together, but she was never the same. Her blood clot hurt when she moved, and she was told that it would kill her eventually. Could be tomorrow, could be 10 years from now. But she was living on borrowed time. And this had a serious phychological impact on her. She was afraid to go hiking now because she thought it would kill her. When she was 7 or 8 months pregnant, we would hike regularly up local trails. Now, she could hardly manage to take stairs without getting winded. She grew self-consious of the veins in her chest, a pronounced blue spider web across the left side of her upper chest.

Life had changed for the worse, and I believe that that blood-clot was the catalyst for many of the relationship problems we've had since then. Who's to know what would have happened with us if that had never happened? Maybe I'd be dead, maybe we'd be more in love than ever now. I can only tell you that many of the problems I now face are consequences of her blood clot. Not in a vacuum, of course. Nothing ever happens in a vacuum (and if it ever did, it would suck). But who's to know? All I know is I've got to play the hand I've been dealt.

From New Hampshire to Connecticut

It was on the drive from New Hampshire to Connecticut that we lost Nix, Chuchulain, and Finnegan. I'm not using "lost" as a euphamism. We literally lost them, somewhere in MA. I was driving the U-Haul we had all of our stuff in from New Hampshire to Connecticut, and behind the U-Haul was our car. It didn't work anymore, the head gasket was blown, but we had it in tow and had put the cats in the back seat to enjoy the ride.

All of a sudden, there was a police officer behind us pulling us over. I took the next exit and he asked if we had lost a car. Indeed, the car was gone (and good riddance). But we were too late. Our over-zealous state troopers overseeing the overturned car in the large median told us that the cats inside were all still alive. But when we got there, one of them had opened the vehicle and they all scattered off the highway and into the woods. We spent some time calling for them, and later had even hired a pet detective to assist us in recovering them, but in the end we admitted that they were lost for good.

And who's to say that wasn't for the best. Because when we arrived in Connecticut, we stayed in a hotel for over 2 months before we got an apartment. My wife had receieved a job offer for IBM in Southbury, CT while we were in New Hampshire. So we packed up our stuff and just went. No place to stay, nothing planned. Just the knowledge that she had a job and we were moving to Connecticut now. The reason that I say it may have been for the best is that I doubt seriously if we could have found a hotel that would have accepted cats, especially on our budget (which was smaller than expected due to being us getting dicked by her new company).

I found a job doing desktop support at Aetna in Hartford, and we eventually did get an apartment in Meriden, not too far from the highway. Meriden is known as the "Crossroads of Connecticut" for a good reason: I-91, I-691, Route 66, Route 15, Route 5 all intersect within a few miles of one another. And it was in this apartment that we brought home our little baby girl, Audrial.

The day that Audrial was born I consider to be the highlight of my life. Best Day Ever. The elation I felt at holding her and telling my wife: "It's a girl" and clumsily cutting the umbilical cord. The look on my wife's face before her desperately matted and tangled hair. God had given me exactly what I prayed for, though I couldn't know it all at that time: a beautiful, healthy, intelligent, and well behaved child. As a man, I was very uneasy handling her, especially so young. I was afraid I would break her. But she was strong.

And so it came to pass that we brought her home, and my wife took some time off of work. But in a few months, all hell broke loose.

From Colorado to New Hampshire

I believe it was 1995 when I signed up with the military. On the summer of 1995, I was shipped off to Basic Training in the south somewhere. I'd already had my head shaved, and when I arrived I got a little bit of flack about that. But that was just the first night.

Basic training seemed to take forever. It was only 2 months, but it was hard. It was hot and humid. I had to learn military things, and get my body "in shape", though I'd prepared for that part by roller-blading around my home town daily. But I was never a runner, never before Basic. When I was a kid, I would get this feeling like a squarely stone sprear was being thrust through my heart when I would sprint. By the end of basic training, I was one of the leaders of my flight. I would chant to myself: "Go primate, go". For some reason, that just kept me going. Like I was an animal and the keeper was forcing me on.

I fell asleep one day trying to put my M16 together. When I was on the range, I had no idea how to clear a jam, though I was a good enough shot at the stationary targets we were shooting at. I was the flag carrier for our flight, carrying the flag while we marched. I was a friend to almost everyone there, and on weekends I would sing in the choir with a couple of my flight-mates who were in on the scam with me. We did it so we could get out of cleaning the place on the weekends. But I do recall cleaning many times, and leading a baudy song more than a few. I can't say I wasn't glad to see that place behind me though. Once I'd graduated, I was off to "Tech School", where I would learn to be a computer operator.

In tech school, I also lead the flight when we marched. Even during a tornado. I was COMPLETELY SOAKED, whereas everyone else was protected from the torrential rain by other airmen to each side. Tech school lasted maybe 3 months. I remember smoking my pipe with my friend, Scott Squire. He was fond of signing his name "S. Squire, Esq." A small man with a light frame, he struck you as intelligent and had a dry humor. His favorite cartoon was "The Simpsons" and his favorite character there was "Mr Burns." He did a wonderful impression.

Tech school came and went, and I found myself stationed in Colorado, at Falcon Air Force Base. I was assigned to do somethat I was completely untrained for: running a communication network for military satalites. I was on one of the many seperate duty stations, training, when something went wrong. I don't quite recall what happened, by my trainer got his butt reamed for it and I was a marked man thereafter. I was officially repremanded for inane things many times, and eventually put in another part of the base, working on the mainframes.

This is where I met the woman who would eventually be my wife. At heart, I was still a kid back then. And a professional smart-ass. Rosalind despised me, and when "they" came to her to narc on me, she jumped at the chance to befriend and betray me. Only their plan went arwy: when she came to know me, she came to love me. For at my heart, I was (and still am) a simple and well meaning man. A man from a place where the license plate motto is "Live Free or Die". And besides, I wasn't doing drugs then.

Not that they didn't have sufficient reason to think that I may have been. My friends Rob (aka "The Beef") and Greg both got busted for buying LSD off of a narc. The guy tried to get me to buy it as well, but I didn't. For some reason, I wasn't interested in that blonde military police officer trying to push some on me. But when they came for The Beef and Greg, they drug George and I away as well, handcuffed. George and I got out of there, but The Beef and Greg got busted and sent home.

It wasn't until I'd met up with Eric DeJonkheere online at one of my old college internet haunts that I started smoking weed again. I met him on the ISCA bulletin board, where I used to be known by such dubious monikers as "Sun King" and "The Jizzmaster". We had known eachother well at the University of Montana at Missoula; he lived across the hall from me in the dorms. We shared common interests, but he oftentimes wanted to kick the crap out of me for the pranks I would play and how I would taunt him sometimes for my own amusement. He stands probably 6'3" and was a football player. I can recall numerous occasions where he would be banging on my door shouting threats at me because I had taunted him on the MUD we used to play together. At which point, of course, I would come to the door and taunt him all the more, driving him into a fury. He always got over it, and in time we both laughed at the times we'd had together.

But to find one of my college friends living not 30 minutes away from where I was stationed in Colorado Springs was, one might say, a pleasant surprise. We decided to get together, and soon enough he and I would go 4-wheeling, camping, or hiking around together. We also got stoned regularly, and once Rosalind and I had moved out of the dorms he would supply me with quarter-bags of choice stuff. Which was my eventual downfall in my illustrious career in the military.

I am told that I had the highest THC count of anyone on the base ever, when I was tested the day after I'd smoked out. A couple weeks later I was removed from my post, put on some kind of punishment duty and months later I was sent home, along with my fiancee, who was also kicked out of the military. Whereas I smoked regularly, she only smoked occasionally. She was kicked out because she said "ass" to a superior officer who wanted her head on a platter. She now considers "ass" a legitimate swear word, possibly as a rationale for getting the boot from the job she thought would have been a life-long career. She was devestated to find out that she was getting kicked out of the military, which stands in stark contrast to my own feelings over being kicked out. "Free! I am finally free!" I hated where I worked. I hated the environment. Everyone did. That's why I started smoking out regularly, to deal with it. I had come to find out that Falcon AFB was well known in the Air Force for it's poor morale. Bottom line: the place sucked, and I had to deal with it.

So, once the day came where we were both given the official boot to the ass, we packed up and took my parents up on the offer to shelter us for a while until the time came that we were gainfully employed. Rosalind had some misgivings about this, and wanted to stay in Colorado. But I convinced her that we should go to NH, that we'd find jobs there and everything would be fine. And for a time, it was.

My mother didn't like my bride-to-be. She said that she was too fat. She even eventually accused her of having multiple personalities because she would sometimes talk in an odd voice she usually reserved for speaking with her mother. She was pretty much all criticism and petty hostility. She "felt like she was walking around on egg-shells" and eventually goaded my father into kicking Rosalind out of the house. I was free to stay, of course, but she had to go. So we left, and moved to a little place in Derry, NH. By this time, we were married . . . I think.

In Derry, we lived in what must have been a converted garage, paying rent to a seedy man named Clement on a weekly basis. Our bedroom was tiny and dark, our walls thin and poorly insulated. We still had our two cats, Nix and Chuchulain, with us. Eventually we picked up a third, named Finnegan. Oh, my wife's bleeding heart. Finnegan was an ill tempered beast. But Nix and Chuchulain we had had from Colorado. Nix was Rosalind's greatest love. As an abused cat from her former boyfriend, Nix was apparently all skin and bones when she saved him. He eventually got too fat for his own good in her care, but he was a good cat none-the-less. And he and Chuchulain (whom we raised from a kitten) were fast, unbreakable friends. More than brothers, they were inseperable.

And it was in Derry that Nix died. We've always thought that it's better for a cat to have a short but full life rather than a long but dull life inside. With that rationale in hand, we allowed our cats to roam freely outside, mousing and enjoying the air and company of other like-minded pets. One day while my wife was sleeping, I heard something outside. I looked in the road and saw through the window that Nix had been recently killed by a car. His eyes glazed and tongue lolling out of his mouth in the manner of dead cats (I've seen enough to know), he was lying in the midding of the street in the mid-morning sun. "Shit", I said to myself resignedly. I wasn't particularly devestated to see him dead (though Nix was the first cat of many that we'd lost), but I was acutely aware that my wife's world was about to come crumbling down around her at this terrible news. So as she slept naked in bed, I knew I had to handle this situation delicately. First, I got dressed. I knew that if I just plain out told her she would run naked out into the street. So I went to her and said in a very serious tone: "Honey, I have something I have to show you. Please get dressed." and I handed her a robe.

"What's wrong?" she asked sleepily, knowing that something was amiss and that it was Bad News(TM). "Just get dressed" I replied, and helped her into her robe. I took her carefully to the window, and held out my hand in a gesture indicating she should look towards the road. At the sight of her beloved Nix lying dead in the road, she rushed out of the house, heedless, and dashed into the street to pick up the bloodied body of the cat to cradle it to her chest, rocking back and forth sobbing uncontrolably. I stood in our yard for a while watching her, and then went into the street to take her by the arm and guide her back inside the house.

Nix was eventually either cremated or buried in a pet cemetary. I don't recall which. My wife was clearly distraught, and morned for a long time thereafter. But Chuchulain was never the same. In this whole telling, this is the only thing that brings tears to my eyes, for some reason. Chuchulain was the second cat I'd raised from a kitten, and the first one in my adult life. He was so perfect, so untroubled, so good and loving and innocent. And when his closer than brother Nix died, the Chuchulain that was died with him. I didn't know it at the time, but he did. Chuchulain had lost his innocence and his personality was permenantly disfigured by the pain of the loss of Nix. "Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something."* Chuchulain became more sullen, and I can still recall his pained cries when Nix was dead. We had placed Nix on the floor in the kitchen, and Chuchulain came and investigated. For days he would cry a low, pained cry of missing Nix (whom I fondly tagged as "Nixus Maximus"). Nix, the broken, abused and fearful cat, had been given a new lease on life not only by Rosalind, but by Chuchualin. Chuchulain's simple innocence and honest love had been good for Nix, and to the best of my knowledge Nix had never entered into a contest of wills with Chuchulain.

After Nix died, we picked up another cat, whom I named Elendil. He was a good boy in his own right, but nothing would bring Nix back. In the end, we lost Chuchulain, Elendil and Finnegan in one fell swoop. Such is life.

Introduction

Like I said, I'm a simple man. A man who doesn't want to hurt anyone. A man who expects to be accepted for who he is, for what he is.

I grew up in a small town nestled in between the "lakes region" and "White Mountain National Forest" in New Hampshire. There was a clean river, called the Pemi, that you could swim in (and see clearly to the bottom, though of course at the time I didn't know how rare that was) and tube or canoe down. Sometimes the river is only a couple of feet deep at the green bridge that seperates my town from Ashland. But sometimes the river floods; I remember a couple of times where people brought out fishing boats just to traverse the road on the Ashland side past that bridge. The water had come and flooded all the way to the college field-house.

Winters in Plymouth were cold, too. Even my father agrees with me that it used to snow "more", and that every year since I was a kid it seems like we're getting less and less. Summers are hot, humid affairs for the most part. Not like down in VA or NC, but it's bad enough. I much prefer the summers in Colorado or Montana. But you can't beat the autumn in New Hampshire. Especially where I'm from. I don't really consider the southern part of NH to be "in NH", if you understand my meaning. Not enough mountains, too many people. And in autumn, there's nothing like seeing the mountains afire with red and orange. People come to New Hampshire in droves just to "see the foliage". Again, another thing I didn't appreciate as much as I should have until I'd left.

When I was a kid, I knew lots of people who wanted to leave Plymouth, to go to a city and get out of that small, nowhere town. To find a nitelife and "culture". I never wanted to leave. I loved my mountains, the high places and rock I had such an affinity for. I loved walking in the woods, or swimming in the river.

But leave I did. If I recall correctly (which, if you knew me, would be a dubious statement at best), I was working bumping chairs at Loon Mountain, living with my parents, home from flunking out of college in Montana. Too much dope and frisbee, not enough understanding of what was going on. Everybody expected me to go to college somewhere. And I wanted mountains, and an adventure away from New Hamsphire. The times I'd been out of New England were few and far between, and I wanted to see the rest of the country, to see what was out there. But I wasn't ready. I lost sight of why I was there - scratch that: I never knew why I was there. I just went because it was expected of me. I eventually forgot my schedule, stopped going to most classes alltogether. That whole time is like a fog to me. I can remember a few things clearly. My friends, the mountain so close (within 200 yards of my dorm), the Blackfoot running through Missoula (again, close enough to walk to and hang out at). The eatery near campus, the wide streets there and how polite people were driving, going to the point of consistantly stopping for you while they were driving down a road and you were standing on the sidewalk by a crossing line. My friend Pete streaking through campus. The first hit I had of marijuanna. Crouching on a rock somewhere upstream of the bridge that lead to Pizza Hut over the Blackfoot river, thinking to myself: "It's true. People don't come here to learn anything. They don't come here to increase their knowledge. They come here to get a piece of paper that qualifies them for certain jobs."

I remember long days of playing Ultimate Frisbee with my friends, my feet stained green from playing on the Oval without shoes, my heels both cracked open in the back. I remmeber the first time I got drunk and puked, playing football at night. I remember my friend Tyler wanting to be photographed humping the grizzly bear that was the school mascot, a large life-size statue on campus grounds. I remember sitting on said statue and speaking to a short blonde girl who was a friend standing below.

I have lots of memories. I think they're all there, buried by time and my adult ADD (which still remains officially undiagnosed and untreated). I'm not hyperactive, but I have trouble remembering things. I have trouble staying focused, and my mind wanders a lot. I'll forget what I was going to say in the middle of a sentance. I'll forget words, mostly nouns, and then go on to describe what the word actually means. "You know, the truck you bring the icecream ... Icecream truck!" I am easily interuppted and distracted. I often walk into a room and think "What am I doing here again?", unable to remember and just walking off, hoping it will come to me. It does, as often as not.

But enough of my recollections; that's not what I'm here to talk about. I did leave New Hampshire, but not for Montana. Montana was a vacation, my home was always still New Hampshire. And even when left the Air Force, coming home with my fiance, I came back to New Hamsphire. But by then, it was less home than before. I'd been gone too long. When I really left New Hampshire, I'd come home from Missoula, MT. My car broke down, and I had to evaluate my options. I decided what I needed was a job where I didn't need a car, and that would cut down on my living expenses. So I got the bright idea of joining the military. And join I did, to the great surprise of everyone that knew me. I was not the "kind" of person who would join the military. Too much of a rebel, too much of a free man. But also too much of a pragmatist. When the time came, I left for Basic Training.