foomart foomart

2009-06-26T17:15:00.000-04:00

Wow! Remember when I used to have a blog?

That was awesome.

2008-12-19T06:07:00.003-05:00

Home, home again. It's good to be back on my machine with the big monitor. I'm letting the backups run and then I will click on that little stamp in my Dock and let two weeks of emails come in. Not looking forward to that, mostly since I left with some unfinished business that I intended to do on the plane but B's laptop didn't have the software I needed.

2008-12-07T04:31:00.002-05:00

Venice is awesome--though we've only spent one full day here. Yesterday we went to Florence and looked at a ton of amazing art; we went to Murano before that and looked at glass. It's been lovely so far! The only problem is the lack of free internet. I'll post much more when we get to Amsterdam where the WiFi flows like water.

2008-11-05T09:56:00.001-05:00

Suck it, haters.

2008-10-28T09:22:00.003-04:00

Dear Verizon,
Please stop throttling my connection. I pay you big bucks for bandwidth and it would be really super duper if you didn't step on the hose every few minutes.

Regards,
Me.

2008-10-08T03:51:00.001-04:00

Wow, wow, wow. There really is no such thing as time. :)

2008-10-07T02:55:00.002-04:00

Great day. I made a bunch of buttons for the Ukuladies, then up to Greg's to record the latest catchy ditty for Ukes for Obama, then out to see the Ukuladies at Rodeo Bar, then B located the missing file of some old tapes and I'm just a happy camper right now. Gotta love good music. It reaches across time and style and just hugs you right up.

2008-10-05T23:00:00.001-04:00

So I am really catching up here. I just joined Facebook, not a moment too soon.
I think this is the first time I've used my full name on the Internet; hope I don't regret doing that! The thing is an absolute privacy nightmare. o wellz!

2008-10-04T17:14:00.003-04:00

Joy! I got a new cell phone, one that has a camera that's not smashed in and a whole bunch of buttons that register, once, when you push them. It's a paradigm shift. I have an IM handle just for the phone; if you know me well enough to text me, just holler and I'll give you the name to add to your buddy list. I've finally got an unlimited text plan so I can be like the cool kids with their prehensile thumbs.

And at last, I can update my moblog again! And I don't have to whine like an overfull puppy every time I pass a little tree on the sidewalk anymore. Yay!

In other news, Ukes for Obama is bubbling away under the surface with a few new toons to debut soon. Agent 99 has a gig coming up which should be a blast; the other bands are hella fun.

2008-09-24T12:00:00.002-04:00

I've had this damn head cold for way too long now. Yesterday I bought a neti pot. It's...interesting. You have to calculate axis, azimuth, pan, tilt, lean and roll, all while basically waterboarding yourself while getting rolled under a big wave. Takes a little getting used to. But it seems to be working; my nose is perfectly clear and the mass in my sinuses seems to be waning as well. Maybe this will be the answer. Based on my Internet research, the people who use neti pots tend to love them a lot; maybe someday I'll be one of them. Either that or we'll have a ginchy new gravy boat.

2008-09-17T17:47:00.004-04:00

So there's this wedding this weekend, and, as always, I was a teeming ball of stress about what to wear. So I shoved myself out the door today, unable to avoid it any longer, and made the trek to the city for invasive oral surgery. I mean shopping. I went to Macy's, since I know no other place, found a floor with some likely apparel, and started looking at stuff. I was on my second lap around the floor, idly wondering the best way to break my own leg to get out of going, and just about to make a break for freedom when there was a fluttering wingy sound, a bright light, and an angelic voice asked if she could help me and I jumped into her arms like Mango.

Her name is Marcy and she's a Personal Shopper. She's my new favorite person. I explained my predicament and she sprang into action, bustling around the store, grabbing outfits (picking up a couple sizes of everything), then led me into a great big private dressing room where I tried on a bunch of stuff while she ran around and fetched other sizes and other outfits as I needed them. She had guessed pretty well to start, since the little number labels inside this clothing are apparently sewn on at random, and any given number can be too big or too small. I would have been a puddling, whimpering mass if I'd had to find this stuff on my own. Finally narrowed it down to a smart little suit that I will wear to every wedding, funeral, and court appearance I have to attend in the next decade or so.

Then she led me to a waiting room where the obsequious woman behind the desk offered coffee as I sat in a comfy chair and Marcy took my credit card and booked herself a trip to Fiji. I mean got me checked out. She came back with all my purchases in a nice garment bag, and told me she'd investigated discounts for me and had found that there was a 15% off deal for using the personal shopper, but there was another thingy starting Saturday where if I donated $5 to the city schools I could get 20% off, and she wangled it for me even though it's not yet Saturday.

So, to sum up, she saved me a pile of money, I didn't have to keep getting dressed and going out to find more stuff, I had help picking out an outfit I'd never have found on my own, I got to relax and drink free coffee instead of waiting for a register, I got a nice little garment bag, and I felt like a goddamn rock star. Totally baller. I guess this is what it's like to be rich. And how much did I spend on this service? Not a blessed sou. It's FREE. Unfreakinbelievable. I'll never shop again.

2008-09-11T00:56:00.002-04:00

Ugh, you know what's fucking gross? Mezcal. I have no idea why I ever think that wormy shit is a good idea. Feh.

2008-09-08T16:27:00.003-04:00

Lil update. We were supposed to march in the Soho Art Parade again, but it got cancelled because of Hanna. No parade fun, but I enjoyed having the perspective on a year gone by. Last year I was worried sick about it and screwed up even the simplest songs (not that anyone could hear, mind you!). This year my bigger worry was dying of boredom, so I spent a little time working out alternate voicings for the chords so I'd have something else to think about. That's awesome.

B and I pulled down the ceiling in the garage yesterday. Once we got the insulation down we saw: the million zillion deck screws that we'd spent so much time screwing through the backer board in the kitchen. I think every one of them is going to have to be ground off before we can run the tubing up there. Big job. They're seriously every three or four inches. But at least we made some progress, and it coincided nicely with our condo getting a dumpster after the dicks in #7 put a bunch of gross garbage out and the maintenance guys wouldn't touch it. Two birds with one stone, as they say. I hope that was my last act as condo president. There's a meeting tomorrow and we're supposed to vote on whose turn it is in the barrel; I'm done.

2008-08-25T13:51:00.004-04:00

The shoot went well this weekend: beautiful weather, auto-free city streets, a good blend of efficiency, inefficiency, and beer at different times of the day. Can't wait to see the finished product.

So yesterday was an off day, B wanted to do some walking and that's what we did, from a tomato tasting to a big-box retailer and more. Then we went home to put our feet up and I got to level 300 in my game.

And now today I'm working on some websites. It is back to work time, for realsies. My goal is to get both websites, the blog, and the mailing list all up and running and off my plate before this weekend.

2008-08-23T07:00:00.000-04:00

3:31 in the morning? I did not expect that.

2008-08-22T00:29:00.002-04:00

Wow, this program has been running for over 24 hours now, working on the C's, and it's not close to finished. I'm a little concerned that it is making changes without asking; all I can see is the first page and I'm not sure about some of these Cab Calloway album titles. I guess it's not that big of a deal, I haven't thought about songs in terms of albums in ages, but it's disconcerting that it would change things without confirmation. I believe there is a semiautomatic setting I could have chosen that will make the program ask me first before making the changes it wants to make, and I'll do that from here on out; I hope it hasn't screwed up anything too badly from A to C.

I do feel better about the disarray of my library. If it's taking the computer this long to do it, I wasn't wrong about the size of the job.

2008-08-21T17:37:00.004-04:00

Oh, incidentally, Jaikoz continues to be slow! I raised its memory allocation and started it on the C's last night before I went to bed; it's still working. And my files aren't perfect. I guess every little bit helps but for the time it's taking I think it should be searching Google and going to the library and figuring shit out for me.

2008-08-21T12:21:00.002-04:00

The Ukes for Obama thing seems to be getting some traction. Finnish and Japanese TV cameras will be there for the video this weekend. I hope we can get enough people on the other side of the cameras to make it worthwhile. Maybe we can rope the camera crews into performing. I wonder where our peace-sign flags are...haven't seen them since Germany. Hmmm.

There's also the Art Parade coming up again in early September. I haven't even looked at the song list for that. I presume they'll be easy three-chorders. I guess I'll bring Eubie for that one; it's the loudest uke I have by far.

2008-08-19T20:35:00.002-04:00

Just one wee problem with Jaikoz: it's slow as shit. I have it working on the A's in my collection, 3237 songs by its count, and it's been running since before I made that last post and it's up to song number 359 in task 16 of 18 right now. Slooooooooow. I hope I'm presented with a cornucopia of beautiful tags when it finishes.

2008-08-19T18:37:00.006-04:00

I think I have found a program that will really help me organize my music library. Jaikoz is the one I tried before that crapped out on me after a few tens of thousands of songs, but I've updated and reinstalled it and am running it on one letter at a time and I really do think it's helping. Of course it's not going to find acoustic fingerprints for the files I have that were ripped from vinyl and other obscure stuff, but if it can do some of the common ones, that will take a bit of the load from me and I can eventually do the rest manually. 'Tis a great burden I bear.

I'm doing this tonight instead of going to the Ukes for Obama meetup. I'm well enough that I'd go to work at a job if I had one, but I don't want to chance infecting the others and having them be sick for the shoot on Saturday.

2008-08-19T10:19:00.004-04:00

I had such an excellent weekend! I went up to Boston to drink, play games, and geek out with fellow Georgers, including such WG luminaries as Wattsburg Gary, the #1 Georger in all of Georgedom, and Hank, the guy who started the site. Amazingly enough, most of the people there were really cool, regular people and a whole lot of fun to hang around with. It's so liberating to be able to really talk about stuff that makes most people glaze over at parties. The icing on the nerdy cake was that a bunch of the people there also play the game I spend so much time on. Even the Georgers glazed over when we got talking about that. It was awesome.

My only regret is that I shared a room with a smoker, which ended up bothering me more than I thought it would and I got a bit of a summer cold. But that seems to have succumbed to an ascorbic acid flush and lots of echinacea and I hope to be OK for the Ukes for Obama meetup tonight.

2008-08-11T20:38:00.003-04:00

Unfortunately, the open mic was based on outdated information, but it's good to know we can scramble an elite team of ukers at a moment's notice. We ended up having a lovely evening anyway: drank some drinks, ate some vittles, found a room that nobody was using and had our own little jam.

2008-08-10T13:21:00.002-04:00

So A99 played last night in a lovely venue in the boonies of Brooklyn (disclaimer: I still don't know from Brooklyn; it might not have been the boonies.) We were well received and the other acts were great as well. We gave the owners some Ukes For Obama propaganda and they were thrilled with it, so maybe that's another player or two to add to the fun. I hope so!

I just got an email about an open mic tonight in the city. If we can scrape something together quickly, that'll be another opportunity to snag some ukers, and to play out, and to get over the feeling of being very unprepared indeed.

2008-08-08T00:22:00.002-04:00

I think I have pinkeye. Feh.
Conjunctivitis, what's inside us?
Crustin' and ooze, allergic shiner...

Hope this shit is gone before our show on Saturday.

2008-08-07T16:38:00.003-04:00

For your amusement, I present my Uke Wall!

In theory:

In practice:

In context:

Sometimes I have a hard time concentrating on work. Don't know why that is.

2008-08-06T01:09:00.006-04:00

Two things:
1. Isn't it weird how an album can remind you of someone, even if you don't think you ever listened to it together?
2. When everything in your life seems randomly crazy and uncontrollable, chances are there's a cat hair stuck in your optical mouse.

Bonus third thing: when in doubt, go to A7.
(Not that A7)

2008-08-03T18:42:00.003-04:00

We were on Dutch TV! A woman showed up to the Ukes for Obama thing last week out of the blue and filmed us for the tee vee. Here's the blog entry. How fabulous is that?!

2008-08-02T22:04:00.003-04:00

Yeah, well, so I'm not in Atlantic City seeing Todd right now. I guess I knew that wasn't ever going to work out. Oh well.

I've got a program crawling through my music library now and thus far it looks promising. I'm hoping it'll let me detangle my tags a little bit faster than working directly in iTunes. Sadly, none of the automated apps that match files to the online databases are much use when you're talking about tracks ripped from 78s and wax cylinders.

...and as I was typing that, it hit its file limit (~10K songs, what a joke) and crashed. Fuck me.

2008-08-01T18:50:00.001-04:00

Looky! The archives are back! Now you have another chance to read all the dumb shit I've written for the past five years.

2008-07-20T23:20:00.002-04:00

I can't believe I didn't know about this until it was too late to go. :(

Agent 99 had our first rehearsal in months, after a good productive beer meeting which was after yet another meeting but I don't want to jinx that. The rehearsal went well and I think we all feel pretty positive about the band in its new form. New songs to learn, and they're all good ones; a gig lined up opening for some fine acts. It's nice to be back in the swing of it again.

The Obama thing is good too. I hope the weather cooperates for our park meetup this week.

It's too darn hot to type. I smell rain but the storm hasn't come through yet; I wish it'd hurry up and drop the temperatures already.

2008-07-10T12:35:00.001-04:00

We finally got the go-ahead from the webmaster. So join Ukes for Obama today! You know you wanna!

2008-07-04T12:30:00.005-04:00

So it was my first ukeversary this week. I celebrated thusly:

(Yes, I am too lazy to take the strap off for a photo. Deal.) I've named him Eubie, and I think he looks pretty damn fine, especially considering he's 80 years old. I think my UAS is in remission now for the forseeable future; I've got all the options that I want pretty much covered. I don't have a reso or a bari, but I don't want either.

Why a banjolele? Because I felt the uke was getting too damn much respect. Actually, the primary use is for the Ukes for Obama project I mentioned earlier. Link TK when the webmaster at barackobama.com gets us hooked up with a space to organize and upload files to. For now, you can buy a T-shirt.

2008-06-22T22:59:00.003-04:00

Happy June 22 to you.

I got the studio set back up in my office and recorded a casual track for a pro-Obama project. YouTube to follow soon, I promise. My sloppy part will be redone or buried in the mix, I also promise. Enthusiastic as one might be, it's tough to follow someone who's actually good.

We saw Gogol Bordello the other night in an empty pool in Brooklyn. Much different vibe from the last time in tiny Maxwell's, but still great. Lots and lots of young people there, which gives me hope. My calves and obliques are still tight from jumping up and down and punching the sky for hours; I just don't do that anymore since I stopped going to soccer games.

Gotta do a website. Once the muse hits it'll go fast but I wish there were some way to force that to happen on schedule. One of these mornings the coffee will hit me at just the right angle...I hope that is soon.

B's found a nice place for his dad. They don't have any full-time openings right now but he's been going to Old People's Day Camp for the last couple days and seems to be comfortable there. I hope a room becomes available soon. Course that's wishing a lot of sadness on someone else, but so it goes, I guess.

2008-06-14T13:59:00.003-04:00

I promised I'd update this blog, so here I am.

I just cleaned out my keyboard, which was gross, of course, and now it's weirdly soft to type on. I didn't take pictures of all the evil that was lurking under there; if you saw the pictures of what I dug out of my office chair casters you can get an idea. But has this made me reconsider eating at my computer? Hell no!

2008-02-17T00:28:00.002-05:00

So Agent 99 had a gig in Brooklyn, at the Blowhole Theater Marathon. They told us ten minutes or three songs, max. They told us we'd be going on around 10:15. So we got there at 9:30 or so, hoping to be able to warm up our instruments and, y'know, tune them and stuff. Turned out the place was claustrophobically packed and oh by the way we go on in ten minutes oh wait did I say ten minutes I meant NOW. So we kind of had to hit the ground strumming. We crammed onto the stage—which was about the size of my dining room table—negotiated our positions around the limited microphones, and I'm pretty sure we played a quick set. It all went by in a blur. I kind of woke up about halfway into the second song. I know we did an encore, not one I expected but fortunately one I knew. From Jersey to Brooklyn for four songs! We finished up and got out quickly; the place was slamfucked and Joe had the perfect excuse since he's got a midterm coming up.

So back on the G train, which was "acting like an F train" while they work on the tracks. A stop or two later some girls got on, and one of them was carrying a pumpkin-orange Mahalo uke. I dug a lei out of my bag (What? I was using it to keep my fez from getting squished.) and put it on her without a word. She was pleased, but clearly not used to the power of the uke...that sort of thing happens all the time once you start carrying a uke around. We talked a little, next thing you know Greg and I have ours out and it's a quick round of Five Foot Two and then we had to pack up and get off the train, giving the bewildered uke girl all the stickers and buttons we could scrounge up after the gig.

Switched trains, got to Manhattan, and we went our separate ways, the boys heading crosstown and uptown and me jumping on the bus which got me home in 10 minutes to be yelled at by Emma, who is still pissed off at us for going away last week and panics a little every time we walk out the door, poor thing.

2008-01-20T15:19:00.000-05:00

Thus far this has been a very good weekend! Our first gig was a smashing success. A whole bunch of awesome people actually came out in the cold to see us. The bar owner has already invited us back. I can't wait to hear what the hell it sounded like from out there.

And today I won an auction for a uke that I really really wanted and actually got a good price on it—I was willing to spend an awful lot more; bargain hunting was the last thing on my mind—but it's nice that it worked out that way.

2007-12-12T00:44:00.000-05:00

My computer is in the shop and Photoshop isn't authorized on B's machine so I can't make this image smaller right now, but I'm sure you'll understand why I'm posting it anyway. Just let it load. I'll shrink it down when I get my MacBook back.
Aha, I did it in iPhoto. Here's Todd Rundgren signing my Foolish ukulele. He smiled real big and said, "Sweet!" And that's Liv Tyler/Rundgren/whatever's hand on his arm.

And here's Kasim Sulton wearing a "Four Strings Good" pin I made.

Life is good.

2007-11-28T10:56:00.000-05:00

I made the cut! As of next Ensemble practice I'm a full-fledged member. (I said member.) I'm told I have "chops," which is the last thing I expected because I was standing next to Herr Direktor last night at practice, and painfully conscious of every mistake I made. So I'm happy to hear the good outweighed the bad overall.

I am suddenly inspired to practice. I have to put the Foolish uke back together today; I clear coated it yesterday and I think I'm going to call it done. It will be interesting to what it sounds like with all that paint on it. I may have created Art instead, which is fine; it wasn't a great player in the first place.

2007-11-14T21:49:00.000-05:00

I wasn't going to post this one; it was my understanding that it would be sent off to England and vanish there. But that hasn't happened, so you're hearing it from me first:

2007-11-09T14:06:00.000-05:00

In case there were any lingering questions about my mental condition, this is what I did yesterday.

slight explanation

2007-11-04T23:24:00.000-05:00

So now there will be less YouTubery, and yet there will be more YouTubery. It looks like the video from the show isn't going to be posted on the Ensemble site. but here is a little snippet of some of us goofing off between the official sets.

2007-11-04T08:27:00.000-05:00

I've started popping up on YouTube. For the most part I have my cloak of invisibility on, but there are a couple frames of me out there.

For one, there's the Willie Nelson thing. I mentioned it before, it's this song he and his daughter wrote and they invited people to submit their versions of it. There's still only one uke band version up there, the Strum Bums version, but, if the hippies ever get around to updating the page, someday our version will be there too. I'm way in the back near the red-haired woman, perpetually eclipsed by a tall guy.

I posted before about the Ukulele Cabaret but now the clip is up at Midnight Ukulele Disco. Clearly nothing to write home about—so I blog—I went after practice (as a spectator, not a performer, hence the lack of costume) and when Andru Cann ordered everyone who had a uke to step onstage I complied. Incidentally, the guy dressed as a cardinal is the tall guy from the Peaceful Solution video.

Very soon there will be two or three more things on YouTube with my li'l face more prominently featured...I'll post the links here if I dare.

2007-10-28T02:06:00.000-04:00

And better and better. Lots of rehearsals, get-togethers, meetups, different projects here and there with different groups of people, and I even ended up on stage along with the real performers at Ukulele Cabaret last night! (evidence) Next week we play the big Halloween Ball, after that there is art and fun and one of these months the trio is going to perform at a Uke Cabaret for real. I think we could have pulled it off today—in a month or two it's gonna be great.

2007-10-11T09:53:00.000-04:00

This uke thing just gets better and better! We recorded some songs last night with the Ensemble and they sound really good. I'm strictly rhythm, of course, chunking along so that the real players can noodle and solo, and I'm happy to be there. I watch these good players play and it blows me away how casual and natural they make it look. I'm still at the "don't fuck up, don't fuck up" stage. I'm glad I'm mature enough now to know it takes a little more than a couple of months to get there. I wish I'd known about this practicing thing back in the day. I honestly don't think I ever did it. But now I really like it. My only problem is figuring which deficient aspect to work on at any particular time. I've got a wealth of choices at this point!

No matter, there's room for all skill levels in the group and the recording came out great. (I didn't fuck up!) We did the Peaceful Solution song and I can't wait until they put up the MP3. Not that it's a competition, mind you, but this version is so freakin' much better than the plodding dirge that the other uke group did. And we changed the lyrics; the Willie Nelson version wasn't quite anti-war enough, la la la. Some of my ideas made the cut...I'm so proud.

There will be a video, and they shot a bunch of footage of us clowning around. I'm told our heads will be digitally grafted onto animated things. Could be really charming, or not. We'll see what the animators come up with.

We did another song, too, a Uke original, which also sounded lovely (I didn't fuck up, and it's a much harder song to play than the two-chord hippie song), but I'm not sure what happens next with that one. I hope I at least get some MP3s of them both, and soon.

2007-09-16T12:54:00.000-04:00

Too many hours in the day? Here is a game to play. I think you should sign up whether or not you intend to play because I get some kind of bonus when you do that, and that is a good thing.

2007-09-07T15:44:00.000-04:00

So, here I am, 40. It's been good so far. I had hoped to post a picture here with a black belt and an oiled six-pack, but oh well. I did, however, start my 40s well, standing up on a sweet Gidget-era Hansen/Cardiff longboard for a precious millisecond. Ok, it was actually more like a low crouch, but my knees and hands were off the board and I was moving, so I'm counting it as surfing, dammit. There were about a dozen dolphins swimming and playing in the vicinity, too; it was magic.

After that it was meat, meat and more meat as B and I scouted out locations for the big dinner. We tried a couple churrascarias (B investigated the veggie options; I went straight for the men with the swords) and settled on Brasilia in Newark's Ironbound section. I hope everybody had a good time. I don't think anybody left hungry. I'm glad I had the ballast in my stomach to keep me from getting silly in the drinking afterward. Ahem. I didn't want any presents, but I got some, and they were thoughtful and wonderful and I feel very lucky.

I read on a uke bulletin board that the NY Uke Ensemble was going to be marching in the Soho Art Parade and invited hangers-on to come join them. So I emailed the guy, got the list of songs to learn, talked a friend into going, and we went to the rehearsal last night. And there they dropped one song, added two others, transposed one into a totally new key, added a new section to one song and a segue into something else, and rearranged the other ones. So it involved a little more thinking on my feet than I'd anticipated, and I loved it, once the initial panic subsided. Now I'm in the woodshed for another day and this time tomorrow I'll be marching, in a loud shirt and apparently some sort of headwear that will be issued to me.

2007-08-06T20:43:00.000-04:00

Want to know what happens when you find bedbugs in an apartment? The exterminators come. Want to know what happens when the exterminators come? They trash your shit like a team of burglars robbing a hurricane. Every drawer of every dresser, emptied and upside down. Every picture taken off the wall. Every piece of cloth needs to be laundered, bagged, and laundered again. Everything you own gets exposed to the killing fog, and then you throw most of it away anyway. All the books get bagged up and put in bins to be quarantined for years to come and probably thrown away or ruined by the basement before that. Furniture gets busted up, hauled out, and kicked to the curb with a warning note that gets ignored by some poor bastard. Anything made of wicker gets evicted with extreme prejudice. More laundry. More vacuuming. More bedbug corpses. Pyrethrin-based poison everywhere, including the rooms with no evidence of infestation, but you clean and launder and vacuum and bin the entire contents of them anyway. Finally a hot shower and you can put your work clothes in a sealed bag until you can wash and cook it to your itchy satisfaction. Then you come back and do it again the next day.

So how was your weekend?

2007-07-10T21:56:00.000-04:00

You've seen Sicko, right?

2007-06-30T22:32:00.000-04:00

In the city last night watching B pack for his weekend up on the Cape. "Say," I said, "what are all these little blood specks on the pillow?" If your skin just started crawling, you know the answer: bedbugs. So we slept upstairs on the couches and started throwing away bedding. He and E left crack o' dawn and I cooked some laundry at high temperatures and fled home to take a shower not unlike the one in The Andromeda Strain.

I did make one quick stop to pick up a trapezoidal package that had been delivered to the school yesterday. Yep, straight from itchy old bedbugs to a shiny new jumping flea. It's adorable. It looks like a tiny little Les Paul. It's been a long long time since I played a stringed instrument, as my angry red fingertips will attest. But they don't get easier than this. I was strumming recognizable versions of songs within minutes of cutting the packing tape. It's electric, too, sorta, which lends itself to all kinds of yummy possibilities. I love my new little axe! Hm, I guess it's not really an axe. More like a hatchet.

2007-06-24T13:08:00.000-04:00

Just a note: Gay Pride parade in NYC. Weather 80 and sunny. God loves fags.

2007-06-24T00:17:00.000-04:00

I found something cute. Let me see if I can embed it here:

2007-06-20T22:44:00.000-04:00

Like English history, like eating Ben and Jerry's, conversation has two kinds of participants: diggers and levelers. Some people seek to find common ground and connect with other people, some people want to dominate and take pleasure in defeating their conversational opponents.

I am a leveler. I think the whole point of life is to make connections and I despise the idea that a conversation needs to have a winner and a loser. I choose not to associate with people (and they are always male people) who would rather argue than agree. Historically, this has just meant avoiding parties where I know the Debating Society will be holding court, and now it means cutting one more person out of my social rotation. Fortunately, I don't need his weed that badly, so it's no great loss for me.

2007-06-14T21:02:00.000-04:00

Love is weird. You think of it as happiness, but it can so easily manifest as pain. Fortunately, the pain is always temporary, but the underlying love never is.

2007-06-13T00:17:00.000-04:00

Ok, we can all stop putting stuff on the Internet now. This is the most perfect image I've ever seen. I bow before the awesomeness of it.

2007-06-09T19:02:00.001-04:00

A pretty good day, all things considered. The dBs are gone for good, the lights and mailboxes are finally all up after a long day of phone calls and facilitating. A few weeds have moved from the beds to the compost pile, and everything that needed water got some, since it seems it's not going to rain. Cocktails in the courtyard turned out to be toddler playtime in the courtyard and ended early with all the parents disappearing, and now I'm bored. I've been fucking around with music stuff but I'm just not inspired. Maybe I'll take another nap.

2007-06-08T17:49:00.000-04:00

Well it turns out I am not as fired as I thought I was. I'll still be working there a few hours a week in exchange for a bottomless mug o' classes. We're still scrambling to make doctor appointments while I have insurance, but with a little luck we'll get all our medical stuff taken care of in the next month or so. The paychecks will stop too, of course, but they were kind of insignificant anyway; I had them overdeduct like crazy so I wouldn't have to pay quarterlies. It was fun while it lasted.

In other news, there are a bunch of swarthy shirtless men outside the kitchen installing the new balconies. They are mounting the top shelf/railing on the outside this time so we gain a few square feet of space out there. They'll also be stained the same color as the siding, and I'm going to stain some wood flower boxes to match, so that should look pretty sharp. The new outdoor lighting and matching mailboxes are all getting installed tomorrow too. This place is finally starting to look like it's worth something.

Just in time; the douchebags have really sold and they move out tomorrow! Happy happy joy joy! We'll meet the new people on Tuesday. Hope they're not assholes.

2007-06-01T13:25:00.000-04:00

So I've been gently made redundant at the school. Since the head instructor's knocked up, they're bringing in someone who wants to work fulltime and also can teach classes. Looks like I have a month or so of insurance before the new employee is permanently installed. Oh well. I'm contemplating retirement. I am also thinking about volunteering at a local animal shelter but I realize I may be too sensitive for that. Sad animals = sad me, and knowing you can't save them all doesn't stop the heartache of wanting to. So that might be a bad idea. Guess I'll go there and see.

2007-05-27T22:30:00.000-04:00

I can tell you right now I'm not going to be able to walk tomorrow. I've spent the last two days kicking serious ass on the condo grounds. Pulled all the weeds in all of the cracks in the front, back, sides and public areas of the courtyard, swept every paved inch of the grounds, put all the sweepings where they belonged. Trimmed and cut back all the plants that needed it. Broke up the rocky sandy soil, added compost, worms and leaf mold to the front beds where I planted Bishop's Weed (said to be unkillable...we'll see about that) in the tree pits. Did community outreach with the idiot dog owners and maybe got one or two of them to remember not to let their stupid dogs step on the plants, at least if I'm standing right there. For a day or two. It's raining now and I hope this will water the little transplants in well. I'm ready for bed.

2007-05-19T16:44:00.000-04:00

It's over. I decided since she wasn't ever going to get better there was no point in waiting for her to get worse. She's with Nemesis and Mite now, under the hostas in Ernest's yard. I'm going to the store for more vodka. Bye, sweet girl.

2007-05-18T22:32:00.000-04:00

Poor cat is miserable. She hates the syringe feeding as much as I do. The new pills don't seem to make her hungry, they just seem to make her cry more. She tolerates the fluids just fine, and catnip seems to distract her a bit. She came into my office when she knew I was eating chicken, and hung around under my chair like old times, but she didn't eat any of the bits I "accidentally" dropped, and realizing she couldn't do it seemed to depress her. She goes to the water dishes—there's one in every room—and sits there with her face right over the water, and just doesn't drink. Most of the time she just sits on the bed in toaster-cozy pose, glowering or sleeping. But she also gets moments of energy, goes out on the balcony or sits by the screen door or scratches on her post. And every time she does that I get all hopeful, every time she goes to her bowl or uses the litterbox or comes into the kitchen. But then she goes back to the bed and looks miserable. And then I have to bring her downstairs and force something into her. She doesn't fight, but it's pretty obvious she doesn't want it. She pukes up around one meal out of ten, so then we have to do an extra feeding an hour or two later, and she's still losing weight despite all this force feeding. The vet closes at 4:30 on Saturday and doesn't open again until Monday morning, and man, that stretch of time looks really long to me right now. I miss living in the country where you just let them out every day and maybe one day they don't come back. With her confined to this building I'm responsible for every minute of her life. When she sits by the door with all her instincts just wanting to go out and hide, I really wish I could let her. I don't know what to do. When do you know what to do?

2007-05-17T19:28:00.000-04:00

The big heavy box of medical supplies arrived, so now I've got 12 bags of Lactated Ringer's Solution and venosets. And also 100 new 20-gauge needles, which are much slimmer than the freakin' harpoons I got from the vet, but with thinner walls so the flow of fluids is said to be the same, and an official sharps disposal container with biohazard warnings all over it. I hope to hell I have the time to use all this shit up.

I also got some pills that are supposed to stimulate her appetite and may or may not have side effects including lethargy, agitation, or howling. Thus far it hasn't had any effects at all, side, front or top. I'm simmering some chicken to make some broth to maybe get her to drink, and hoping the smell will waft up to where she is and get her juices flowing, but she hasn't come down here with the munchies just yet. In any case I also got a pornographically huge food syringe from the vet, so there will be food in her stomach one way or another.

2007-05-16T23:58:00.000-04:00

Delancey has been doing really well the last couple days. We have a rhythm down for her feeding and she's had a good healthy amount of food for two days straight. She's still not even close to eating on her own, or drinking water, but we are getting food and fluid into her. She's perking up a bit, all things considered—her kidneys are still fucked, of course, and there's no changing that—but I think we've fended off the fatty liver for now and are making her a bit more comfortable. At least she's more comfortable when we're not squirting syringes of slurry in her mouth. I wish I could figure out how to communicate "if you would just eat we wouldn't have to do this" to her.

2007-05-15T22:59:00.000-04:00

Well, I've finally finished syringing her food into her for the day. I don't want to do this every day any more than she does, poor thing. I wish she'd eat.

2007-05-15T09:01:00.000-04:00

Well, the fluids went fine last night. The only problem was that the doctor had squished the air out of the bag before spiking it with the venoset and we couldn't find a water line to judge how many cc's we gave her. I fixed it this morning and we gave her way too much but she seems to be okay. She ate 12 syringes full of food today which is great. If she starts eating on her own I will be in heaven.

I have to go to work now, and it's killing me. But she's in better shape than she was this time yesterday so I will try not to freak out.

2007-05-13T12:24:00.000-04:00

So. To my sadness I was right about Delancey: her kidneys are failing. The vet gave me three options: spend two or three thousand dollars on hospitalization and repeated dialysis to have a 50% chance of curing her if it was an acute case brought on by poison, and a 50% chance of revealing that it was chronic which would mean home care. Option two was Chinese children and I'm not hearing that just yet. Option 3 was to go directly to the home care, and that's what we're doing. In hindsight it's pretty obvious that this has been coming on for a while and is a chronic condition. Apparently cats can get by with a small percentge of their kidney function and they don't really decline until they hit like 30% which is where I guess she is now. So the object is to help her stay comfortable and hydrated.

Crying my eyes out didn't help, so I turned to the Internet since I was kind of unclear on what the vet had said. I have to give her a quarter of a Pepcid AC every morning, and squirt some Maalox-type liquid in her mouth twice a day before meals to bind the phosphorous in her food. I also have to (L.S. do not read)
give her subcutaneous fluid every other day, 150 ml from a big squishy liter bag which I have to hang up and stick her with a great big needle and then fill her up with fluid. It makes a big bulge under her shoulders which then moves around to her chest or legs before it absorbs.
So that's me for the next little while. She won't drink water or eat much, and I'm hoping that will change. I dipped up a bowl of rainwater and she drank a bunch of that so I put a bunch of philodendron cuttings in a mug of water and I'll leave that in a sunny spot on the kitchen floor in the hopes that as they root and the water gets funky she will be interested in that too. I'll also have a bucket out to catch any rainwater we get from now on.

A sympathetic older lady sitting next to me at the vet's office told me that in the middle of her life she'd stopped having pets because she couldn't bear the pain of losing them. But now that she was older she had changed her mind, because the love was worth it. I hope she's right.

2007-05-06T15:49:00.000-04:00

Well, 34 minutes on the phone and I'm getting a new bat tree. This one didn't catch on fire or deform or blow up or do anything interesting. It's just that after I ran the battery updater my charge time dropped by an hour, which fuck. I didn't think I'd get a new one out of it, really, but I guess losing an hour of battery life is enough to qualify.

Now I have to go have some Vitamin C to offset the free radicals generated by half an hour on the cell phone.

2007-05-05T21:14:00.000-04:00

Ah, this was my kind of day. I got a karate class in early, nice long leisurely walk in both directions, went shopping for condo light fixtures with some agreeable neighbors, took some pictures, roasted some chicken, made some yogurt, dug out a tank top, did some crossword puzzles, spent some time in the sun. I'm going to be forced to stop working soon; I have to calibrate my battery since running the latest update may have revealed a problem and if I need a new one I want it sooner rather than later. So I will probably get something done even tonight, though it won't be that website or anything online, and that's fine. Happy now.

2007-05-03T00:28:00.000-04:00

This is already all over the tubes but if you haven't seen it, loltrek is darn fine.

2007-05-01T23:58:00.000-04:00

Since god forbid a meme should happen without me glomming onto it:
09-F9-11-02-9D-74-E3-5B-D8-41-56-C5-63-56-88-C0! Power to the people right on!

2007-04-30T22:20:00.000-04:00

A really weird thing happened yesterday after I petted a cat and rubbed my eye. Wanna see? It's pretty gross!

2007-04-30T19:45:00.000-04:00

I got acupuncture today after work and before class. Acupuncture rules. I felt like an electric stove burner, all glowing buzzing lines. She semi-deliberately made me late for class, and strongly advised that I not take it tonight, so I went back to the dojo and just picked my stuff up and headed home.

When I got to the elevators, the one on the left was full of people but not moving and I thought it was my lucky day and they were waiting for me. Turns out they were stuck, and pretty damn gloomy about it if you ask me. Personally I would have been awfully happy to have been stuck at the bottom and not the top or, worse, the middle. They said they were waiting for the fire department and when the other elevator came down there were three firemen on it. They weren't carrying axes, though, to my great disappointment. One had a little red toolbox and from it he produced a big jailer keyring with a lot of long cylindrical keys on it. It looked like a set of wind chimes. One of them found the proper key and stuck it into a little hole at the top of the elevator door, and...nothing happened. At this point they realized that the doors at the other end of the elevator were open so they'd have to do something else to get it to work. I'm hoping it involved an axe, but I'll never know, since the other elevator came back at that point and I got in it, joking with the rest of the people who had been gawking at the zoolike display. Sorry, but it really was pretty funny, from the outside. Perspective is everything!

Ran into a neighbor who said she'd heard that the dB's got a good offer on their place. Fingers crossed.

2007-04-29T17:55:00.000-04:00

I'm vexed. I got a wee portable graphics tablet so I can do graphics stuff while I'm at work, but the stylus needs a battery and the battery it needs is an AAAA. So of course there aren't any around and of course they don't have any at the supermarket so I buy a 9-volt to take apart and harvest the AAAAs out of but it turns out the ShopRite brand is made differently. It's a stack of plate cells instead of a series of AAAAs. Rats! I've wasted a 9-volt battery and now I have to wait until I get into town tomorrow to find out whether the thing works.

The sun's out, though, and it's gonna set soon. I think I'll watch it happen from the solarium, with a nice frosty beer.

2007-04-28T23:57:00.000-04:00

I decided I haven't been having enough fun lately, so I resolved to do something fun today after karate. A bunch of happy people in Hawaiian shirts, noodling on ukuleles was just what the doctor ordered. Fonely I'd bid higher on that great shirt with the sheet music to "My Little Grass Shack" on it on eBay all those years ago. I would have been the hit of the place. (At least until they realized the only song I can play is "My Dog Has Fleas.") There were some really interesting instruments there. I was amazed by the range of types and the amount of effort that goes into making what I always thought of as a very silly instrument. There were gorgeous high-end abalone-inlaid models for thousands of dollars, cigar box models for less and also for more, cute colorful ones, antiques, painted and carved models, a crazy bass ukulele with fat rubber tubing strings and a big free bowl of homemade plectra cut out of old credit cards. Clever!

2007-04-25T18:51:00.000-04:00

So I noticed my office chair was getting a little more slidey than rolly and flipped it over to investigate. Next thing I knew it was an hour later and I had this in the middle of my floor (note X-ACTO® knife for scale):

I can't say I didn't enjoy doing it, either. Since mice have all gone optical you never get to clear out big wads of hand salsa anymore.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go trade in that pile for this really pricey watch fob B was eyeing the other day. Shhh! Don't tell him; it's a secret!

2007-04-23T13:35:00.000-04:00

Ah, bummer, I just found out the next black belt test will be held in September, not August. Since there is no way I can go to the one that's in 2 weeks, this means there is no way I'll make it before the big birthday. Oh well. I guess it's better; less pressure on me to get it done that day. Sigh. I'm still on track for my other pre-birthday goal, anyway.

2007-04-12T21:43:00.000-04:00

We got a letter today from some scammy types who want to charge us 90 bucks for a copy of our own property deed. I saw right through that; that's not the issue. The important part of the letter is the punctuational paradigm shift they've just put me through.

The period-commas in their name, I can take that. I bet they saw it somewhere and it looked so nice they wanted to use it, twice. The veiled snarky commentary on the Garden State, hey, I've done that myself. But they've taken the grocer's apostrophe to quite another level from anything I've seen before. I mean, this is "queen to queen's level three" stuff here. I'm not sure what to do with my brain now.

2007-04-12T15:23:00.000-04:00

Law of Attraction, baby. I was stressing about paying the taxes and some big bills that are coming up, so I made a conscious effort to change that and think positive thoughts about money. In the last ten minutes, six different chunks of money came through, three of them nice large chunks, one of them quite unexpected, and now we're in good shape. Thanks, universe!

2007-04-11T13:17:00.000-04:00

Oh, it's gonna be one of THOSE, is it.

Schlepped down the hill for class, and it wasn't until I walked in the door and saw all the kids that I remembered they'd canceled the adult classes for kiddie camp this week. Meandered back home, growling, did a little grocery shopping, and got home to find a UPS sticky on the door. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

On the plus side, I'm about to send out a big job so that should mean some money sometime. And I have tomorrow off, because of the camp, so I can get caught up on everything else that needs doing, fun stuff like cleaning, organizing, and taxes.

2007-04-05T13:07:00.000-04:00

Put away the belts, but not yet the uniforms. Coffee time!

2007-04-05T12:10:00.000-04:00

I'm at work, but I ain't doing shit today. I repotted the dracaena tree. I had to close the place up and go get more potting soil. That's the extent of the work I have done so far. I've got phone calls to make, and soon will have uniforms to put away, but for now the sum total is one happy dracaena and otherwise jack shit. And now it's time for my lunch break.

Nice work if you can get it!

2007-04-05T10:24:00.000-04:00

It is SNOWING out there. What the fuck? I am not putting that goddamn liner back into my coat again this year, do you hear me?

2007-04-01T01:00:00.000-04:00

fifteen years ago today
on the beach at Maho Bay
no one there but you and me
earth and fire, wind and sea

2007-03-28T23:53:00.000-04:00

GOD I AM SO FUCKING GLAD IT'S SPRINGTIME. This winter kicked my ass something fierce. And by "kicked" I mean "expanded". Finally, finally, I'm getting back to feeling like myself. I had a killer class today and stayed after to pound the living shit out of the heavy bag. That thing will not mess with me again.

I'm also in a nice tying-up-loose-ends and organizing mode around here. I like it. It's terribly pleasant to see a little patch of horizontal surface in here every once in a while. It doesn't stay that way long, of course, but for that moment it's just filled with potential.

2007-03-28T18:22:00.000-04:00

Die, Capital One, die. I can't take it any more. In today's oversized envelopes—just two today, one addressed to my business, one to a misspelled version of my business—they'd put the usual offers but instead of the goddamn fake credit card they put a sheet of bubble wrap. It wasn't protecting anything, it was just there because Capital One are evil scumbags and want to make it more difficult for us to shred and recycle their constant junk mail. I despise them. I called to complain and the useless fuck on the phone wanted to go through every name and misspelling that gets mail at this adddress. I think I eventually got it across to him that I wanted no more mail whatsoever at this address. I may have neglected to mention the apartment number, though. You're welcome, neighbors.

2007-03-17T12:00:00.000-04:00

You know, maybe if they'd let the queers march in the St. Patrick's Day parade they might get some decent weather one of these years. I can't think of the last time it was anything but sunny and gorgeous for the Gay Pride parade, and I can't think of the last time it was anything but shitty, cold, rainy, icy crap for St. Pat's. I think I'm gonna make a hand-painted sign that says GOD HATES THE IRISH and go hang out.

2007-03-16T11:38:00.000-04:00

Ugh! Wasn't it 69 degrees a few days ago? It is Nasty out there. Ooh, my favorite: ice pellets. The question is, what to do with the day.

What I should do: something from the long list in front of me which includes toothsome nuggets like taxes, laundry, and setting up the online shopping cart for an e-commerce site I'm working on.

What I will probably do: get as far as I can on this alumni directory I'm working on; make the entries play nicely with each other despite their having come from hundreds of people in several different forms, and then I will play with a song that the nice people at NIИ were generous enough to distribute as a pile of Garage Band parts. Oh, and bite somebody.

2007-03-14T20:11:00.000-04:00

Well, here's hoping the third time's the charm with the fridge. The third guy came today and actually seemed to know what he was doing, unlike guys one and two. He had the proper diagnostic equipment, unlike guys one and two, and knew how to use the information it gave him. He was also smart enough to listen when we told him what the problem was. (In a nutshell, the defrosting cycle would kick in and never stop.) So we've bought a new logic board, like a three-second Google told me we would, weeks ago. I am still seething with resentment that we had to pay the first two idiots for wasting our time, and hope I actually do write the letter I want to write and send it to some muckety muck at the General Electric Company.

Fun and varied projects are popping up like cute li'l mushrooms. Just enough to not get bored, but not so much to get stressed. Just the way I like it. It'll be a trip to work on a square canvas instead of a round one for a change. Wonder if I'll leave the corners blank out of habit.

My curtains came in! They are purple, way purpler than the picture. Purple like Crayola purple. B got me a rod today (Heh. I said rod.) so when he gets home with it I will finally get some privacy. (Pronounced the English way.) Then again, if the neighbors haven't called the cops yet, I guess they're not gonna. Unless there's a local ordinance about purple curtains that I don't know about, in which case I'll order the lime green ones.

I also cleaned up the front garden a little. I think it's still too early to pull up all the leaf mulch, but the DBs have threatened to clean the grounds this weekend and they don't know what's planted where in our little space. At least the leaves all went on the compost pile out back. I'll donate some worms this week, and they will have an absolute orgy in the half cantaloupe that's out there. Or is it a honeydew? I can never remember that one, probably because I hate melons.

My train of thought was just derailed by the unignorable sound of a noisy bunch of kids out back. Three of us badass homeowners went and moved them along in the whitest possible way. "Uh, you guys can't hang out here...it's, uh, private property." That was someone else, mind you. I was just there as backup muscle.

2007-03-13T13:45:00.000-04:00

Here's a little riddle for you:

Q. What's worse than a pigeon on top of the awning right outside of your (non-openable) window?

A. HALF a pigeon on top of the blah blah blah.

There's a hungry hawk in Hoboken and he's doing a number on the pigeon population around here. Unfortunately there tends to be a tail or a feather, a wing or an eye <tm> left behind after he eats all the mushy bits out of the middle of them, and this one is front and center outside the window. I hope we get a hard rain sometime soon.

2007-03-13T00:59:00.000-04:00

Well, okay, so it's been a day. I got up at 6, with a jolt, as I realized I hadn't gotten a confirmation call about the refrigerator repair that was scheduled for today. Same refrigerator that broke a week ago, yes. Anyway, I hadn't gotten a call or an email, but Echo was down yesterday so any emails would have bounced. As it turns out, they did call, hung up without leaving a message, and Googling the mysterious phone number reveals I did get a confirmation call of sorts. But I didn't know that at 6 this morning.

I tried to get back to sleep since the repair window was from 8 to 12 and I'd selected "as early as possible" in the additional options. So my clock was set for 7 and I really needed the extra sleep since I'd been up late the night before since my body didn't get the memo about the bullshit time change.

Anyhoo, there was no sleeping after the jolt so at 6:38 or so I got up and took a shower and got dressed and made coffee and started a batch of yogurt to use up the rest of the dairy products that had been out on the balcony in a cooler bag with some ice. I knew that today it was supposed to get up into the 50s, which would normally make me very happy, but since the outdoors is our refrigerator these days, this was not the usual good news. However, I figured it wouldn't hit the high temps until at least noon and the fridge would be working by then, of course, since the window was from 8 to 12 and I'd selected "as early as possible" which of course meant he'd be there right at 8. Which was why I got out of bed at 6:38.

I sent IMs to B, documenting my waiting, every half hour or so starting at 8:00. I called my boss at some point with a status report that I was still at home. She knew I was going to be late, but since my service window was from 8 to 12 and I'd selected "as early as possible" in the options I knew I wouldn't be too late. So at 11 I called the service people, navigated the phone menus, and they said that the fact that I'd called to check up would be noted in my service record. Good, I thought, maybe that way the repaircritter will realize I have places to go and will get here early. I mean even earlier than he was already planning, what with my having checked the "as early as possible" box and all.

Around 11:15 I got an automated message that I was next on the list for service. When the repaircritter came last week, he came about 20 minutes after that message. (Yeah. Last week. Same job. Apparently, looking at the circuit board, unplugging the fridge and plugging it back in doesn't actually fix the thing for all that long.) So yay. I called my job and left a voice mail in case any of the guys came in early and wondered why the door was locked and where the hell I was.

20 minutes came and went. 30. 40. Set. Match. I started sharpening knives. An hour later, the fucking bozo rang the bell, not a word about being late. No apology, no acknowledgement that I'd checked the "as early as possible" box. He just wanted to chat about my pinball machines. I growled at him and flipped the breaker for the fridge upstairs.

He had clearly never seen one of these newfangled fridges before. Pulled it out from the wall, saw the cover plate where the computer stuff is, ignored that completely, and started dismantling it from the inside, after forcing me to take part in a spectacularly stupid conversation. ("It seems cold inside," he said. "That is because I have placed a large block of ICE in there", I said.) Anyway, he took the thing apart and found a screw that was loose on the bracket to the fan. Here it is, he said, here's your problem, the reason your freezer is 60 degrees. This screw was loose on the fan bracket. That will be one hundred and seventy-two dollars.

At this point it was after 1PM and my refrigerator was in pieces all over my kitchen, so, having few choices, I paid him the money and he screwed it back together and all appeared to be well. I went off to work, narrowly avoiding murdering the kid who wondered if I had a few minutes for the environment, and had a short work day. I worked out, serious power punching with my Navy friend who just got back from Saudi Arabia, and after I changed I checked my phone and there was a happy voice mail from B saying the fridge was 35 degrees and the freezer was 6.

So I went home, tired but happy, and walked into the condo meeting already in progress. There was wine and munchies, and it was remarkably non-contentious as we decided how we'd spend the money we have and how we'll spend the money we'll get. We also had elections and I'm the new president. Hail to the mothafuckin' chief. Stand back, Buenos Aires, I intend to rule with an iron fist.

Aaaand then B noticed that the freezer was 31 degrees. So even my new presidential powers weren't enough to fix the fact that I had to schedule yet another service appointment because, as I suspected, the fucktard had no idea what he was doing. A three-second Google reveals that BAD LOGIC BOARDS are endemic to this model and obviously this one needs replacing. I guess these servicecritters don't have Google. So I wait. And I wait. And I wait. And I sharpen the knives.

* * *

I just checked. Freezer's up to 43. Must kill.

2007-03-07T15:24:00.000-05:00

Holy shit, it's been a month? Sorry! There is no reason other than I just kind of forgot about posting. I think it's because I changed browsers and my "post" link got pushed off the edge. Now let me think of something to write.

2007-02-07T21:34:00.000-05:00

And the plot coats the back of a spoon. Seems the FedEx guy THREW my package up onto the little balcony off the kitchen. Hope B's music equipment isn't getting delivered by FedEx next week.

2007-02-07T15:39:00.000-05:00

Well, an "investigation" is underway at FedEx and the nice lady at Trident told me the gum would be back but she couldn't say when. So I'm off to the supermarket to buy 'em out, one aisle at a time. (It's this, by the way, if you have them near you. I'll buy 'em off ya with Clown Money.)

2007-02-07T14:11:00.000-05:00

Shit!

Fucking FedEx left my package on the "back porch." I don't have a back porch. The imbecile probably left it in the courtyard out back, you know, the one directly in front of the door of the HUGE APARTMENT BUILDING next door? Has FedEx ever successfully delivered a package? Ever? They have fucked up every delivery I've seen them try to make.

And this on the day I find out they're not making the gum I like anymore. I think I'm going back to bed.

2007-01-29T09:00:00.000-05:00

Ok, so it's morning and I'm sitting in front of the TV eating my breakfast. I'm drinking coffee, so really the caffeine hasn't hit my system yet; I'm in that phase of the day where my eyes are looking at the Weather Channel but I have no idea what the faces are talking about and if you asked me what the weather was going to be I couldn't tell you. So maybe my mental state is responsible for this total disconnect, but the fact of the matter is: I am pretty sure I just saw an ad for AARP that used a Buzzcocks song.

And my brain said ç¥ˆ??¨hjUUI©iFe?§tHKG¨Á¨†øˆ›€ˆºˆº&*¢??ƒçµˆ›??ÎR%$&(Ç´GˆÆ|%^§NO CARRIER

2007-01-28T22:52:00.000-05:00

This discussion about autism was sidebarred on MeFi. If you didn't read it and follow the links in the thread, you really should.

2007-01-26T22:45:00.000-05:00

I went back to the Zeckendorf Towers for what I hope will be the last time today. As expected, the TB test results analysis consisted of me showing my arm to the nurse (Martha, one of the good three, and I told her so) for one second. Getting the process started for my records took longer, a couple trips from floor to floor and a bit of form filling out, but according to the man in the records office I should have them in 10 to 15 working days. I'll wait 20 and then go back there.

I figured out a workaround for an issue I was having with a website I'm designing, and it wasn't nearly as bloated or inelegant as I had feared it'd be, so two days of frustration turned into an hour of work and now satisfaction. I believe the client will be thrilled; I hope she will.

Early bed tonight; B is getting up at dark:30 tomorrow and I shouldn't lollygag too much myself. Got two classes to take and then I get to show off my cute new web thing to the client at my favorite local spot, the one with the killer java and strong WiFi.

Today's Chi-Ching: Maryland and Ohio: Manly deeds, womanly words; with God all things are possible.

2007-01-26T00:49:00.000-05:00

Just to leave this on a nicer note, the day wasn't a total waste. I invented a new fortune-telling method. I call it the Chi-Ching. Here is how it works: look in your pocket when you need guidance. Note the state quarters you have. Look up their mottos, and there you have your fortune.

Today I had two New Hampshires and a Massachusetts. (Live free or die, live free or die, and by the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty.)

I think this could catch on.

2007-01-25T23:48:00.000-05:00

Okay, there are exactly three people in the entire Beth Israel facility on Union Square whom I would trust to find the word care in a dictionary. The rest of them are an impenetrable phalanx whose only function is to keep hoi polloi from getting near any actual doctors.

My P"C"P wants to find out why I'm slightly anemic. I told her I'd been anemic since I was a child. She wants to know why that one number is slightly out of range. She is not interested in any of the things that I went in there to talk about, she just wants to get to the bottom of this one fucking number. Apparently her method of finding the answer to this problem is to tell me to schedule myself for another battery of tests in May. No changes, medication, or advice of any kind, just more tests. Did she ask me what I eat? No. When I suggested that perhaps I could eat more foods higher in iron, cook more in cast iron pans, or even—stay with me now—take iron supplements, she was visibly crestfallen as she admitted those things might be helpful. Like I was cheating her out of watching her stupid number.

Meanwhile, I was in there because I was casually wondering what's been causing my hair to fall out by the handful. Me, I would guess it's probably something UNDER my skin that's out of whack, but she wrote me a referral to Dermatology. Even as she wrote it she told me it wasn't the right kind of referral and that I would have to walk to Dermatology, get an appointment, and then take this useless paper to the women down the hall with the headsets on to get a "computer-generated" referral. I actually did all this before I realized the appointment I'd made was for the last day of my insurance and that there was no chance of any subsequent visits. So I went back to Dermatology and cancelled my appointment. Somehow they were able to do that in a matter of seconds.

My P"C"P also wanted me to get a baseline mammogram. The first available appointment in Radiology is six months away. I only know this because when I walked up to Radiology and sat there waiting for anyone, anyone to acknowledge me, as medical and clerical personnel walked in and out with the same averted ignoring eyes as a rotten waitress who's about to go off shift, I heard her tell this to someone on the phone. Fine. You win. I went home. No appointments made, no plans to go back other than I have to go in tomorrow so someone can look at my arm and confirm that it hasn't blown up all red and that no, I wasn't exposed to my coworker's TB. But then I am going to try to get a copy of my records—stop laughing—before I leave that place for the last time. I've left the entire afternoon free for this task, and I bet I'll leave emptyhanded and in tears anyway.

I hope the new insurance is better, somehow. I'm not confident it will be. Look at what I found when I googled for the word holistic.

2007-01-25T08:17:00.000-05:00

Today's Freecycle gem:

Wanted; coat rack [hudson county ]
in need to hang our coat up ty

2007-01-23T21:41:00.001-05:00

So having agonized with my colleague and wishy washing between option A and option B for like MONTHS now, the big boss finally caught me and forced me to have the meeting I'd been weaseling out of every day, wherein she offered option C, aka the best of all possible worlds. Had any of us affected folks known it was on the table, this would have been over with before the holidays. So in any case it looks like I kinda sorta have a job now, part time but with benefits. Same as what I'm doing now only more so.

Some time soon I expect to hear that I also have a niece or nephew. J's water broke Monday morning, and I don't think babies like to be rattling around in there all dry like the yolk in an old hard boiled egg.
- -
on edit: it's a girl! Welcome, Lila!