vacation's coming, and a good one, my favorite, with good food & family & beautiful weather, usually, oranges and browns and a little cold which never hurt anything. but these days it's been raining, and raining hard, a lot, so i take my truck, no sense biking in this stuff. and i look back at the camper and try to imagine the best kind of plywood i could use to make a little cabinet, to hide all the junk, make a place to sit back there sometimes. the vet says to tell my wife to stop calling it an "old" truck and start calling it a "vintage" truck. papers piling up, but i've started hocking my students about chat, and asking my kids about it, surprised that as different as languages are around the world, they all seem to be developing an internet-based written short-version, & i'm learning some about it...but back to the truck- this morning, another cold rain, pouring out onto the street out in front of our house, out in the ornament valley, and what do i see, but the perfect piece of plywood, just the one. it's out in front of the neighbor's house, and it's a red political sign, republican. a red plywood in a blue state. now this poses a moral dilemma, because, i know i'm not going to have time to paint it or even deface it for months, although, if i'd-a thought about it, vacation's coming. ironically, the plywood sign is about how somehow the republican candidate is going to solve the state's teacher's pension someone-robbed-the-piggy-bank crisis. did i mention that, in the same way alaska has this rugged gun-carrying individualism running through all people, both parties, gonna have to moderate that if they ever want to seriously join the union, well, illinois is the same way about corruption, you could put it on our license plate. i left the plywood on the street, but that's too bad, 'cause if i were a little less picky, or a little less visual, i'd have a little red box to put stuff in. i have a shed now, and i'm going to put old license plates up on the walls in it, maybe during the break, when the older kids are around to see it, and talk about old cars they used to grace...cars is a big subject around here- we're on the cutting edge of the curve, making cardboard dinoco helicopters and frank the combine models- wish i were in the business, i can tell by the google traffic that the market is better for things like that than, say, music. gotta do something in retirment, though- somebody spent the pension money already, several times over, i suspect. and i'm holding on tight to some stuff - memories, if nothing else, save it for a rainy day, so to speak.