monkeyplus1

Peace the fuck out, smurphy. Hope that flood of information you were always bursting with landed somewhere.

 

Born the same year as me, married the same length, divorced, children of equal age. Also a self-taught programmer.

 

I called him smurfy one day, combining his first and last name. He said, how long did it take for you to figure that out? You can call me smurphy, but you have to respect the “ph”.

 

He was notorious for going off-topic in meetings. And my laughing probably didn’t help but to egg him on.  A business analyst from another team called him out on it one day, said, you know, you’re like a real-life Eeyore. Even he had a good laugh at that.

 

Walking from a company bell-ringing, a joker on our team calls out to me from behind, and I turn and see him grinning, walking next to smurphy, obese irish dude with a shaved head, goatee, sporting geek-glasses with a red unibrow and fuzzy ears.

 

“Ten!” he says, “see?”, and wags his finger between the two of them. A visual joke, he being skinny as a one, smurphy waddling along as round as a zero, launching smurphy into “there’s 10 kind of people in the world: those that understand binary, and those who don’t”.

 

He thoroughly enjoyed one-upping me at every shred of geek cred, though I long since learned not to give him too much fodder, as he could ramble for an hour.

 

As his wife was leaving him, Nario and I had welcomed him back to the end of our row near the window, and we all formed the basis of our friendship, as I drew him out of his shell with philosophical questions about his mormon belief. I knew that because I’d once asked him to get some coffee with me, lo and behold, mormon’s do some weird shit, but they don’t drink coffee, but will glug Mountain Dew like there’s no tomorrow.

 

One thing he’d been talking about was the idea of the eternal soul. I’d said the desire struck me as egotistical. I wouldn’t want to be myself again, I’d want to be something different.

 

He had a really rough divorce, his life was altered so suddenly, and his ex-wife and son moved from Oregon to Georgia.

 

Before the divorce, he said his wife was Peruvian, was a personal trainer. He’d met her when he was a Mormon missionary. He’d spent a couple years in Japan and could read, write and speak Japanese fluently, and spoke passable Spanish, but I’m not sure if he met her in Peru or not.

 

He’d joked that as soon as she had her citizenship, he was pretty sure she’d dump him.  She did and she did. He tried hard not to put up a surprise, and gave practically no resistance to her moving across the country to live with her brother in Atlanta. It fucked him up. He stopped paying the mortgage on his house, said fuck-it to everything but his job, and moved to a basement apartment in downtown Portland.

 

He’d expected his son to have more of a reaction besides, “cool, I can see my cousins.” He worried his son wouldn’t get to know him, and I think, know how cool geek he was.  He said, my son will think I’m just a nice fat guy who brings him presents and hangs out for a day or two.

 

His health took a dive with the divorce. After a coughing fit one day, it looked like he threw up a lung in his garbage can, and left work suddenly. A few other episodes where he was either sent home, left mid-day, or didn’t come in.

 

It was bad for a while, but he seemed to be coming out of it.

 

He’d made a trip there for his grandfather’s funeral, but had a few extra days to hang out with his son, eight years old. Seemed to have come back happy.

 

There was a big scale over by my desk. People would have weigh-ins, but many people would sneak in on the scale, strategically placed far from anything.

 

smurphy saw me on there one time, and waddled up with a joke at hand, saying he laid bigger shits than I was.

 

One day he walks by my desk, pauses long enough to give me a curious nod, and walks over to the scale. He stands there, nods his head, and goes off towards the bathrooms.

 

Some time passes, I notice him making his way, serious face, slowly towards the scale again, back towards our cubes. He gets back on the scale, and I can tell he’s smiling. He walks by my desk, thumbs up and grinning, “two pounds”.

 

It liked to make him feel better, to poke fun at me sometimes. He’d kept making dumb jokes about the bald spot on the back of my head. Asked if I was growing a crop circle on the back of my head, so the aliens would have a place to land. Finally I said, “if it really makes you feel better about yourself to make fun of that, go right ahead. Please, I want you to feel better about yourself.”

 

For a time thereafter, it was battle of the old school. Reminiscing about the days when computers were primitive, and relatively complicated beasts.  It was fun, and there was really no way to top his tales. He’d talk just to hear himself talk, and because I would listen.

 

“What do you need today, little man,” he’d like to say. “What do you weigh, a hundred pounds? What programming task would you like me to do for you today that you can’t do for yourself?”

 

I’d run across him in the hallway, and made a ridiculous arms-out, happy-faced gesture that looked like he was squeaking like a big happy mouse. It was stupid, but it always got a laugh out of me, and I’d practiced in improving my own happy-faced gesture in reply. He’d shrug, face go back to its usual blank state, waddle off to some destination.

 

If the bathroom was empty, and we happened to be there at the same time, he’d make extremely inappropriate comments that nearly caused me to piss all over myself instead of in the john.

 

He was a good guy, seemed like things were getting better. He’d gone on an internet date to go see Moby. He’d tried so hard to find a date, and would send charming and hilarious emails to women, and finally had a girl to see a live show with.

 

I don’t know why women don’t like me, he said one day. I’ve got an irresistable charming sense of humor, I’m extremely overweight, and I’m hung like a chipmunk.  As if that was something to be proud of.

 

He charmed the girls at the front desk of the building into printing him a no-access ID card, that just had a picture of his smiling mug he’d emailed them, and asked them to print “Not a Serial Killer” on the card, and they did it, five bucks. He handed the ID card to his date.

 

They’d had a good time, though music made it impossible to have a conversation.  I don’t think she was up for a second date, didn’t happen.  He’d planned on seeing Regina Spektor a few days ago, the first of November. Changed his mind, said he didn’t care, and sold the tickets on the company bulletin board.

 

He had some days, where I could tell he was getting stress, boss telling him to clamp down and get more shit done, be quiet, and focus.  I didn’t want to give or take any heat, so I split for a couple days. On Wednesday, he’d calmed down, and when I talked to him, his hands had resumed shaking.

 

He’d had a case of the shakes back in April or May, and had a disappearance from work.  That turned out that because he sent the email from his own domain, swmurphy, the bosses email stuck it in the junk/spam folder.

 

Thursday he surprised me, I walked up to his desk to shoot the breeze, he turns around, hands shaking but smiling. “How should I do it? I think pills.” He said he hated being assigned multiple high-priority requests, all that would take a long time to do, then having the priorities constantly switched on a daily basis, depending on what conversation his boss had just had, and ended up getting nothing done.

 

Caught off guard, I probably agreed, then quickly changed the subject.  I think 404 walked by, and we were suddenly talking about CMN.TB_CRM_CLIENT_MAP versus CMN.TB_XRF_CLIENT_ID, the supposed reason I was at his desk in the first place.

 

He wasn’t happy, but showed up in costume for halloween the next day, wearing color contact lenses he’d ordered off the internet, and devil ears spirit-gummed to his head, painted head to barefooted toes in red.

 

We were grabbing lunch at the same time, horsing around, then as we walked back upstairs through the staircase and were out of any earshot, again he said, “Yeah, pills would be the way to go.”

 

Yeah?

 

“I think you’re right, little man”, he said. “I hope there’s not an afterlife. It would be just another fucking hassle, of some kind or another.”

 

“Probably,” I agreed.

 

“You really think, pills?”

 

I frowned, “or shotgun. Put it in the mouth. Squeeze. Pop. Don’t miss.”

 

We laughed.

 

“Knowing myself, I’d miss,” he said.

 

“True, true. Stick to the pills.”

 

Didn’t see him at work this Monday, on Tuesday I’d checked periodically to see if I could spot his shiny pink dome behind the cube wall, walked by and saw his empty chair.Figured he was on PTO. On Wednesday, checked his calendar, no PTO, sent email to his domain asking if he’d gone AWOL. No reply.

 

Couldn’t help thinking, he wasn’t in good health, thoughts of our jokes, now in bad taste, a few days before.

 

My friend G called, she asked if I knew sean had been absent from work, said, yeah, been trying to email him. smurphy’s playing hookie. “Well, they found him,” she said. I pictured him laying, still, glasses askew, cats meowing.

 

What the fuck was he doing? Where was he?

 

“Well, he’s not coming back to work.”

 

What, they fired him?

 

“No, he’s deceased.”

 

I’d almost emailed another friend earlier that afternoon, saying how sean’s jokes about suicide last week seemed to be in poor taste since he hadn’t shown up for work for three days. About how mis-management had left a small team of developers with no standards, no redundancy, fucked-up silos of shit-code only the author could read. It would blow up in their face if someone critical like him just quit, or suddenly keeled over, off’d himself.

 

I asked without having to, “how?”

 

“Pretty sure it was suicide.”

 

Yeah. Fuck. Not the slightest surprise. Disappointment. Shame. I wish things had turned out better.

 

> shutdown -immediate

 

swmurphy

1973-2009

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Seems like it’s been weeks of snow on the ground, a first since I arrived her fifteen years ago. In the past, it’s just been a day or two, but this is ridiculous.

This picture was after the worst of it, after a snow day from hell where the neighbors and I spent the day on the roofs, some thirty feet off the ground, clearing problematic ice packs and snow accumulation.

Here, the girl is just moments from sinking in the powedery snow thigh-deep.

The wife’s car, left on the street, was blanketed.

(My WRX stayed nice, dry and warm in the garage).

Driving in the snow has been a learning experience. Four-wheel drive is fucking awesome.  Never getting past 30mph, I rarely used the breaks, leaving the car in gear the whole time, and slowing down by just taking my foot off the gas.  Excellent traction, no chains, no snow tires.

There were a few iffy spots.  My neighbor was driving me to a rental place to get the 30-foot ladder and growing impatient with the slow traffic, unwisely decided to use a side-street.

We spent nearly 30 minutes stuck atop a snow-pack, the wheels just digging the car down farther into the snow.

Some Phillipino-looking guys eventually pulled up with a snow-chained Jeep, unloaded some tow-straps, and pulled us right out. One of them said, “you guys got a Subaru stuck in the snow? SHAME!”.  I laughed and pointed to my neighbor, “HE was driving!”.   I could have just as easily made the same mistake, so I learned a lesson from it.

Yeah, the snow has gotten plenty old, we’re tired of it.

It’s xmas eve, and the kids are still up at 9pm, getting on each other’s nerves over who gets to pop some bubble-wrap that came with Grandma’s packages.

Well, it’s time to go spank some xmas cheer back into them. Happy holidays

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I’ve been enjoying some time off between contracts, luxuriating in the new house.

Since I can think of no close friends or family that share my love of aviation history, I drove myself down to the Evergreen Air & Space Museum down in McMinnville, about 40 miles Southwest of Portland.

It’s probably best known for housing the Spruce Goose, the enormous, wood-and-fabric seaplane built by Howard Hughes.  That’s only mildly interesting to me, as the museum also houses what I was really interested in - beautifully restored warbirds.

There is a replica of the Wright Flyer, the first airplane.  Here is an old bi-plane, showing the wooden struts normally covered by fabric.

What really got my interest on this visit, since I’ve read so much about their mission in Vietnam, was the F-105 Thunderchief, aka, the “Thud”.   (The huge grey wing over it belongs to the Spruce Goose).

These were originally designed in the 1950’s to fly supersonic into Russia and drop nuclear weapons.

When Vietnam came about, these planes were fitted with conventional bombs, and flown out of several bases in Thailand against heavily protected targets in North Vietnam.  The defenses there were state of the art radar-guided anti-aircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), provided by the Soviets and Chinese.

Some of the F-105s were fitted with electronic counter-measures to jam the North Vietnamese defenses, known as “Wild Weasels”.   They carried an interesting weapon called a Shrike.  When the Vietnamese SAM batteries activated the radar-guidance for their missiles, a Shrike could home in on that signal and fly right down to the battery. That was really high-tech for the time, when there was no GPS, no JDAMs, and laser-guided bombs were still years away.

The bomb-dropping was very low-tech by today’s standards, and not too far improved from the techniques used in WWII.  The flights of Thuds would fly from Thailand, across Laos, and then drop down into the mountain valleys of North Vietnam, using the mountain ridges to hide them from radar.  If the weather was good, they’d continue on until they visually identified the target, pop up to get some height, roll-over and into a dive-bomb, drop their weapons, and afterburner their way out of the area.

They took such heavy losses, that instead of requiring them to serve a specific amount of time overseas, if they lived through 100 missions, they could go home.

Here are some shots of the cockpit of the Thunderchief.

Lastly, I’d just finished reading about P-38 Lightning pilots in the Pacific theater of WWII.   I believe this plane is restored to look like the one flown by the legendary Jerry Johnson, a triple-ace from Eugene, Oregon. (The book is called Jungle Ace and I highly recommend it).

Col. Johnson shot down 24 enemy aircraft in 265 combat missions.  After surviving all that, he was on his way home from Japan after the war to his wife  and child, when his aircraft was lost in severe weather, never having been found. The aircraft (I believe he was flying a B-24 home), had 5 parachutes for the 7 people aboard.  Johnson and his co-pilot stayed aboard while the other crewmen parachuted down to a beach they’d overflown.  Johnson had planned to turn around and make a crash landing on the sandy beach, but was never seen again.

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Statistics, not made up, but not academically qualified either. With respect of all HIPAA rules, no individuals are identified by my research here, I just went looking for trends and pointless statistics.People who have accidents, are mostly female:

However, people who have accidents involving guns are largely male. Not really surprising, is it?

TOP AREAS OF THE BODY FOR GUNSHOT WOUNDS:

1. Not Specified

2. Leg / Foot

3. Chest / Abdomen

4. Head / Neck

5. Hand / Arm

6. Back

7. Eye

8. Buttocks

Almost three-quarters of those with suicidal tendencies are female:

People with sexual dysfunction, male & female, by age:

For men, the most common dysfunction is erectile. They can’t get a boner. For women, it’s a disinterest in sex and/or anorgasmia, the inability to have an orgasm during intercourse.Now people do wacky things, like show up at the hospital with foreign objects needing to be removed from their bodies. This is actually super common.I would have guessed the pooper as the number one spot, but it’s actually at the bottom of the list, forgive my pun. And before you have naughty thoughts, the foreign objects in the vagina are most often an irretrievable tampon, not some Hello Kitty toy.

TOP PLACES FOR A FOREIGN OBJECT IN THE BODY

TOP AGE GROUPS TO NEED FOREIGN OBJECTS REMOVED FROM THEIR BODY(20 year olds and 60 year olds… ewwww)

TOP MEDICAL ISSUES INVOLVING A VAGINA

1. Childbirth

2. Hysterectomy

3. Prolapse (this one’s weird, but the vagina and/or the ovaries can actually turn inside-out and fall out of the body, hanging below it…more common in women past 50)

4. Yeast Infection

5. Other

6. Bleeding

7. Discharge

8. Repair (often after prolapse or childbirth)

9. Growth (vaginas can grow things besides babies…like teeth and hair…no kidding)

10. Lesion

11. Itch

12. Atrophy

13. Hernia Intestine Into Vagina (the poo-hole can rupture into the baby-hole)

14. Foreign Body (most commonly a lost tampon, but other unspecified things find their way into vaginas)

15. Lichenification (hard, scaly tissue)

16. Warts

17. Pain During Sex

18. Herpes

19. Hematoma

TOP MEDICAL ISSUES INVOLVING THE ANUS

1. Fissure (a tear in the anus)

2. Bleeding

3. Other (oh, there’s quite a few)

4. Fistula (an opening between the anus/rectum and the skin)

5. Polyp

6. Pain

7. Itching

8. Abscess

9. Warts

10. Colectomy (having part of the anus/colon removed)

11. Resection (not too different than colectomy?)

12. Fecal Incontinence (pooping yourself)

13. Herpes (of the pooper)

14. Inflammation

15. Foreign Object (how’d THAT get up there, I wonder?)

TOP MEDICAL CONDITIONS INVOLVING THE PENIS

 

I’ve excluded erectile dysfunction, it would have overshadowed all the rest by far. Peyronie’s Disease means a bent penis. In some cases, it’s related to scar tissue formed as a complication related to diabetes. Candida is another name for yeast. Micropenis… well, that’s easy to figure out. Shrinking seems most often related to a side effect of some medication.Top Abused Drugs(I have a few graphs of these, taking the top few off each time so the numbers of the remaining are more apparent)

excluding Alcohol, tobacco:

excluding Alcohol, tobacco, marijuana:

Excluding alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, and meth:

Excluding alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, meth, and heroin:

while on the subject, since Marijuana is extremely prevalent here in Oregon, marijuana users by age (looks like it peaks at 30 years of age):

Obesity, male vs. female:

 Obesity by age.

 Psychiatric issues, by age:

 Schizophrenics, by age:

Anorexia by age

 Anorexia by gender

Anxiety by age

Anxiety by gender (why so anxious, ladies?)

Incontinence by Age (this is both urinary and fecal incontinence, meaning pissing or shitting oneself)

Incontinence by gender:

Types of incontinence:

Old age is a bitch.

I’ll sign off with that lovely thought.

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I read this morning in the news that 3 people were burned at Austin Hot Springs, about 40 miles Southeast of Estacada, Oregon. The water there can apparently get up to 190°F.

About five years ago, I took my kids tent-camping in this area. It was less than an hour from Portland, up in the cascade mountains. My daughter was about 2, my son was about 5 at the time.

The river water is ice-cold and very fast, perhaps it’s snow-melt. We set up camp by a bend in the river that had a small lagoon that was perfect for wading. The water is so cold, it’s an instant-ache in your bones as soon as you set foot in.

My son and I actually got in up to chests, and dunked our heads under the water. After about 5 minutes, our lips and fingernail beds turned blue, so we warmed back up on the rocks under 95°F sunshine.

I take a big book of topographic maps of Oregon whenever we go camping. Not only do I love the level of detail, but they also show little things that are not marked on a normal map, including Austin Hot Springs.

The next morning, we drove out there, and found it only by driving with one eye on the odometer, having carefully counted the mileage on the topographic map.  There’s no signage, no parking, and except for a flash of color from someone’s towel, it would be very easy to drive by without knowing it’s even there.

We parked off the road. Walking up, we could see a group of people, and realized the hot-springs lay on the other side of the icy river. To get there, we had to carefully walk on a fallen tree trunk that crossed the river.

Before crossing, I told my son that if he started to lose his balance, to drop immediately on his butt and straddle the log with a leg on each side.  Then I had him practice on another fallen log on the ground, just to make sure he’d be able to do it.

Then, I had him very slowly go in front of me, and carried my daughter piggy-back.

After the heart-pounding crossing, we walked over to the hot-springs. Apparently, the people were a large family of Russian immigrants, from very young to very old. I’ve noticed young Russian women are often strikingly beautiful.  Middle-aged and older Russian women are often strikingly big-boned and bear-like. I’ve yet to see evidence of the transition - my guess is it happens immediately after marriage.

The hot-springs right next to the river, with river rocks having been set up to separate them and create a little pool, with gaps for letting in cold river water to help cool down the water. Some old carpets were at the bottom of the pool.

When I stepped in, I realized the carpets were there to keep you from burning your feet on the heated rocks. I immediately felt like I was cooking, and quickly opened a gap to let cold river water in.

Here is the problem - super-heated water, and super-cold water simply don’t mix, they’re two very separate layers.

Part of your body will be completely freezing, the other part scalding.

In Dante Alighieri’s “Inferno”, when he makes it to the bottom of hell, he finds Satan.  Half of his body is frozen in a lake of ice, and half of his body is set afire, living in a state of simultaneous extremes.

That’s what this felt like.  It was too hot for my kids, and too hot/cold to enjoy.  We left after about 10 minutes, noticing the stout Russians didn’t seem to mind the water.

The article says this place is private property and has been fenced off for a while. I had thought it was either in the national forest, or it was BLM land, but perhaps it belongs to a timber company. These three were apparently trespassing.

It’s probably lucky for them that Portland is only about an hour and a half away.

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