Laughing with Rasputin, fingering scars over a beer

This is day three of Oregon Trip 2006, aka, deathmatch with mother-in-law. I actually like her, but unless one is willing to buy a ticket into her funbumbmental world, the best one can hope for is scribbling notes on a soccer ball and kicking it over the berlin wall that stands between us. She may physically cause illness in me. Yesterday I tried to tell her that Grover Cleveland was the only President in U.S. history who has not had an affair in office. She couldn't accept that, because most of our presidents have been Christians, right? Riiight.
The pops, however, and the rest of the family, too, are great. They're just as different, besides Drew, but they don't have the Christian Jihad Syndrome-thing going on. I've escaped today into town to drink some coffee, hit their gaunt excuse for a library, and check my email.
Onna is having a lot of fun out here. We're in the woods on a minimountain that sits in the middle of Pinot Noir vineyards in the Willamette valley. Yesterday morning we woke up to a crazy electrical storm like I've only seen during monsoon in Arizona before--Denny said that he'd never seen anything like it in Oregon since he's been here--and while O. and I were looking out the window, lightning struck a tree about 75m. from the house, split this huge tree right down to the ground. A little hunk of wood from the tree hit the house, and it smelled like fresh-cut wood and burning paper. O. loved it, and kept saying, "again, again."
We've also been able to have a bb-gun target-shooting contest (which I obviously won) and O. and I have been keeping tabs on a doe with two fawns that live in the area. The mom comes into a clearing near the house in the morning, and checks us out from a ways away for as long as I can keep Onna from yelling at them to come over to us.
I still haven't been started my sleeve. I fear I may get a bad tattoo up here to tide me over. It feels really nice to be able to relax with Lindsey up here, to play with O, and not have anything to worry about (aside from going crazy from the deathmatch).