Hammer Mill Days

Want to see me make a donut disappear. Ala-kazam! (*Gulp*) Ta-daaaa! Okay, now... watch me do a half-moon. Presto-change-o ! (*Gulp*) Where'd it go? Where'd it go? Next... Oh, hello. (urp.) Glad you could surf by. I suppose you might be asking yourself, What the fuck is he doing now? Well, friends.... "what the fuck" indeed. The things I have to do to keep people on board with this pointless venture of ours! (Yes, yes... we keep losing people to other unrelated pointless gestures - it's very discouraging.) You may recall that sometime last week, in our despair over the water table having been depleted by the man-sized tuber's thirsty relatives, we began digging makeshift wells in the cobblestone courtyard of the Cheney Hammer Mill. And, having run into some (predictable) difficulties with that endeavor, we resolved to employ some kind of hacked-together magic to make our well-holes - this seeming a more immediate course of action than waiting seven years fo...

Mercifully, I have a short drive to just about anywhere I'm likely to go. My day job is minutes away, my mom lives across the street, my sisters the next street over... in fact, none of my immediate relatives live more than 15 or 20 miles away, and they all work within spitting distance of where I live. Both of my wife's and my vehicles, while ancient, are four-cylinder sedans, only one of which we drive with any regularity. If we clock 5,000 miles in a year's time, that's a lot for us, so I'm filling the tank of my '93 Accord probably once every two weeks. A year ago, that cost around $30; now it's $40 or so - manageable, thus far. But these precipitous price increases on gasoline are killing most people I know (and most of those I don't know), and there appears no end in sight. It would be bad enough if it just hit you at the gas pump, but it affects everything else as well. The food you buy, the employer you work for, the community you live in - every...