Slackjaw's Forum

We’re having eye problems. Well not “we” exactly, Sweetie is, to be more exact. She had laser surgery last Tuesday evening to repair torn retina in her eye. On the last night of the final day of Ike’s cast, Sweetie was having trouble getting his pants up over his butt and in one swift motion, she lost hold of his waistband and smacked herself full on her eyeball with her knuckle. I recommend not trying this at home. The surgery seemed to go well and her vision was just starting to clear when Saturday morning it all went south again. A blood vessel had started to leak into her eye, obscuring her vision. Imagine a big black goober everywhere you look and you kind of get the idea. Saturday things got a little bit scary. Not much they could do about it. There was too much blood to try and use the laser to cauterize the bleeding. Things just kept getting worse and by Sunday morning she couldn’t see anything. This issue is compounded by the fact that she has no central vision in h...

My cat was peeing blood around the kitchen floor while we were out Saturday afternoon. Little drops the size of a silver dollar. We were at a bon voyage party for Sweetie's niece before she and her new beau set off for sea trials on the ship he captains. From there it’s on to San Francisco and then to Mexico. Our cat, Zane, is an old girl, a little over fifteen and blind. She had been missing the litter box as of late and most mornings this past week I woke up to find a puddle of urine on the kitchen linoleum. I packed her up and took her to the 24-hour animal hospital down off South Tacoma Way. They did the check up, gave her a shot and some medicine to take home and said to call our vet on Monday. So far in the last few years I have taken both of my sons, both my cats and my neighbor to the emergency room. I told Sweetie that I’d had just about enough of being the crisis chauffer and have no interest in making it a clean sweep with her being the last to go. Not that I ...

Throughout most of the nineties I worked as a film electrician, running lights and power for a number of forgettable films, movies of the week, TV pilots and commercials. There was a small band of us, maybe 15 in all that would vie for the few positions available when a new movie would come to town. I was not on the A list. Not that I was a bad electrician. I could hold my own with most of them, even working as a Best Boy on a few low budget films, but I just never managed to get that one connection that would catapult me to the you’re-my-first-call-when-I-get-to-town kind of spot on the list. In truth I didn’t mind so much. There was, for a while, plenty of work up here in the Northwest and I even managed to make a decent living at it for a time. But I think down deep I knew that my heart was not set on lugging 90 pound coils of 4/0 around a soccer field at two a.m. to establish a “ring of fire” because we had no real idea of what they were going to shoot, or where, or wha...

The Prairie Dogs have been playing a lot lately. More than I’m used to at any rate. Played last Thursday night up in Seattle at the Rendezvous Jewel Box Theater, a bar that is run by my sister-in-law’s sister and husband. We had played the Friday before that at Kings Coffee here in town and this Friday we’ll be playing at Shakabrah Java up on 6th avenue filling in for a last minute cancellation they had. Our oldest boy starts school tomorrow. There’s a full time Montessori preschool program here in town that looks really great so we signed him up. He turns five in November so he’s too young for kindergarten, but really too old to just do daycare two times a week. We’ve been crossing off the days on the calendar and he’s raring to go. Sweetie, Ike and myself are taking him tomorrow morning where they have something called “Coffee and Kleenex”. I imagine it’ll be hard to see him go. Speaking of Ike, he got his cast off Friday and he’s none to pleased about the whole thing let...