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January 02, 2006
I Told You This Wasn't Really My Idea
 Kate sends this CNN article by Calvin Woodward, who biked across the country last year using part of the TransAmerica route:
Over three months on roads less traveled, I didn't hear America singing, as poet Walt Whitman did in his exuberant 1855 tribute to a rising nation and its confident workers.
I didn't hear it whining, either, as cynics do today.
I saw America going about its business without fuss.
It waved from front porches, fixed up houses, talked about the day and the times in little coffeehouses.
Grew fields of soybeans and sunflowers, saw the sun come up and go down in the same sky each time, ran trains that thundered and wailed.
Downloaded gospel songs.
Dreamed.
One of the reasons I quit drinking (as opposed to just having a drink), is that a deep drunk pulls the serotonin rug out from beneath my brain for days afterwards, and leaves me a quivering mass, full of dread. That's about where I am at the moment...the house is a mess, there are eight billion things that need doing before it goes on the market, Pea's away in the city so it's quiet and empty, I still haven't got work, and I woke up at 2:30PM covered with dark thoughts, what the hell am I thinking?
So, instead of taking the CNN article as another experience to study in advance of my own, I'm immediately bursting with negatives: Great, CNN's picked TransAmerica up now everybody will do it/nobody will want to publish a book about it/blah blah blah.
Once upon a time, my usual response to this state of gelatinous neurochemical constipation was to go out and get more booze, immediately, and partake of said booze as soon as possible, if not sooner. Today, I'll go to physical therapy instead, get my heart rate up a bit, and be around people.
I just heard back from Paul, the production manager at Greenspeed in Australia - he estimates that I'll probably have my trike at the end of January. Which is good and bad. Good, because I'll have my trike!, and it's always good to have a new set of wheels, especially when there's three of them. Bad, because back when I ordered it, the production delay was going to be a bit longer. I would (hopefully) have some work by the time it arrived, so that I wouldn't have to put the remaining purchase balance on a credit card in advance of getting the proceeds from the house sale. I'll do my usual 0% balance transfer shell game, but I'll still be piling up more debt.
Someday, I will be entirely out of debt. And on that day there will be much rejoicing, and the eating of fattened bankers, and the best portions of the banker's fatty flanks will be retained for the gods.
In the waning week of 2005, reader Carrie e-mailed:
I think a trip like this is by nature transformative. If the object is self-knowledge. And feeling powerful as Zeus (I imagine that will come at the end of the trip, as when changing the same tire repeatedly in goathead country, you will likely be the one railing to the gods) probably also a perk, once you get some distance into it. No wusses on this trip. Something amazing, by definition, will come of it.
On days like today, when I can feel the very organ of my brain in my skull as though it's outlined in camphor, the object of the trip seems to be escape, as thought there's nothing left to do but what I'm doing: minimize, put the head down, and barrel off into the wilderness. Think of all the things I won't have to do next: find an apartment, move, find a car, get new work that's pretty much exactly like the old work, etc. Through the prism of a somewhat wobbly psyche the journey seems more like an easy way out than anything else.
Fortunately, I have some small grasp of that prism's nature, and I know that this will pass. The journey will again seem like a Journey, and if I'm lucky, I'll be able to use the very thought of it as motivation for all the practical tasks that must be done. It's starting already - a kind of half-assed positive feeling!
Calvin Woodward took three months off to bike across the U.S.; then he had to go back to Washington and keep doing whatever it was he did there before he left.
Me? I won't be "due back" anywhere.
Which is reassuring, in a terrifying sort of way.
January 04, 2006
Gordon Freeman Is In The House
 Apologies for the vast tracts of contentless space. I picked up Half Life 2 for my Xbox and got sucked in.
That's a good thing. Immersive gaming is what I like, and I haven't played a decent one since Halo 2.
One of the criticisms leveled at Half Life 2 is that there's no multiplayer component. But I don't want to play with other people. I want to stay up all night scarfing pizza and blowing things up until my heartburn compensates for my bleary aim, exploding heads with the force of its reflux. Then I pass out until noon and do it all over again, until the game is finished and I am victoriously unemployed.
January 05, 2006
Still On Video Vacation
But if you're looking for something good n' weird (emphasis on the weird...use a two-ton block of frozen opium goo with rusty nails in it for an emphasis, if you can manage it), I highly recommend the animation work of David Firth.
Start with some Salad Fingers (episode one, two, three, four, five, and yes, even six).
Spoilsbury Toast Boy is good, too, in a Burroughs-ish sort of way.
Now: back to pixel devastation, thank'ee!
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UPDATE:
Automated laser-tripped gun turrets suck ass.
January 06, 2006
Sometimes, Faith In Da Humans Is Warranted
Proloxil, as you may or may not know, is my idea. It's a made-up medication that I invented in 2003 for the purposes of satire, cartooning, and t-shirt sales. Copyrighted and all that.
So, imagine my surprise when I discovered that someone had registered the proloxil.com domain in 2004.
There was no actual content at the address, just a placeholder. So I was pretty sure I had a cyber-squatter, someone who intended, somehow, to profit from my idea. My word. My satire! No no no, I said to myself, this shall not be.
Using Whois, I identified this cyber-squatter. And through cunning Googling, I found out a bit about him, just in case I needed, you know, to exert some pressure. Then I sent a "chest-forward" e-mail. Proloxil is mine! I told him, and he had no right to the name. I would pay him $14.95 for the domain, not a penny more, because that was how much it would cost me to register it with my own registrar.
He wrote back. "Yikes!" he said. "That was kind of a mean e-mail. Of COURSE I will give you the domain." The domain was registered through 2007, and he asked if I would cover his prepaid costs. I wrote back, apologized for my tone, and explained that I thought he was a squatter. His terms were completely fair, so I agreed.
And then: he simply gave the domain to me. The amount of money involved was less than he thought, he said, and asked me to do something nice for a stranger by way of karmic recompense. He set up an account for me with his registrar, sent me all the account's login information, and wished me a happy New Year. He even arranged it so that proloxil.com forwards to this site, and reminded me to change the password that he had created, so that he would no longer have access to the account.
Still don't know why he registered the domain.
But it was a wee bit of a lesson for me, nonetheless.
January 09, 2006
Footgear!
 What you're looking at right here is a pair of Rocket7 custom mountain bike shoes. These are the shoes that will carry me across 5,000+ miles of American roads.
The foot-pedal interface is the most important part of the whole cycle-human cyborg. It's where the power of your organic legs is transferred to the mechanical gears of your drivetrain. If the footbed of your shoe is too squishy, you lose power, spending it in compressing the soft foamishness instead of pushing the pedal. If it's too stiff and unyielding or not shaped properly, you'll end up with foot pain. I've got some weird nerve thing that happens in my patooties, and after a round of visits to various podiatrists and orthopedists, and experimentation with various "stock" footwear and pedal platform combinations, the custom footwear option was the last resort.
"Clipless" pedals, for those who need to know, actually clip onto the shoes you're wearing (the terminology is a holdover from the days when Tour de France riders raced on wooden rims, smoked cigarettes after long climbs, and sometimes raced drunk). This direct connection to the drivetrain gives you a more efficient power transfer, because you can "pull up" on the pedals as well as push down on them. Switching to clipless pedals on my commuter cycle in New York City was a revelation! My bike and I were one.
I justified the expense of these shoes the same way I justified the expense of the trike: I will be traveling across the continent under my own power, and I damn well better be comfortable doing it. Getting these shoes made involved a soft foam casting, tracing, and three-point "girth" measurement of each foot. The first go-round wasn't quite right - the arch in the right shoe was way too high, resulting in the big big pain while pedaling. So the shoes went back to Rocket7 for modification in mid-November, and I've just got them back now.
They're sweet cycling footwear: hand-made, with close-grained synthetic leathers that resist decay, and a custom carbon-fiber footbed.  230 grams per shoe, which is important: reducing the weight of anything that "spins" (wheels, pedals, cranks, shoes, etc.) provides a significant performance gain over weight reduction in static parts, such as frame elements or handlebars. Which means I really should lose a bit more belly before I leave.
It's a little scary spending this much on an item like this, because even if it's made perfectly, it will still be uncomfortable when you first put it on, and will stay that way for a couple of weeks. That's because the leather and the foam insole need time to mold to the foot in the course of normal use. I'm wearing them now to speed up that process a bit, as I sit on the couch watching "The Road Warrior"...getting all the moldable bits used to my feet while I contemplate an apocalyptic future wherein the suckers kill each other for gazzoline and black leather assless chaps while I pedal on my merry solar-powered way.
January 10, 2006
Not Just 'Cause He Says Nice Things
Vanx ponders bloggage, and in the process identifies why I hardly read political blogs anymore: they are formulaic, and I've been cured of the peculiar brand of OCD that afflicts political blog junkies. Hallelujia! The "market" for such blogs is also well-saturated, which is one reason I hardly ever do political bits myself anymore. The political bits I do post these days tend to be cartoons, which is pretty much the level I want to be: absurd and (hopefully) funny.
January 11, 2006
Gosh.
So It Begins. Or Ends. Or Something.
We're about to enter the Time of Great Wackiness here at Peapod. Pea herself is slammed with deadlines for the next three weeks. Because it's the beginning of the year, I'm starting to get calls for various projects, one of which will sooner or later result in a gig for me, probably on-site. And we're trying to get the house prepped to hit market at the end of the month.
So I'm swathing the dining room in layers of plastic and that low-stik blue tape that 3M charges too much for, mainly because no one else makes anything like it. I will use sanding blocks to remove 40%-75% of the spackle that I've been slathering on the walls like a monochromatic frescoer of limited faculties. This will create great drifts of spackle dust that will inevitably cover the entire house with a thin layer of white powder, plastic or no. And somewhere in the midst of all this we must continue to remove our possessions a few boxes at a time, stashing them in the storage unit, and tidy up the place, to make it look like it's worth living in.
Which it is. I like this house, I always have, despite the car wash beyond the back fence and the various oddities inflicted upon it by the previous owner. It was strange to wake up this morning in the bedroom, snug and warm and toasty, and think that I will be trading its Whimsical Blue-painted walls for the blue and white nylon of my tent. The buzzing knot in my chest wasn't really due to that realization, though...it was more about how much needs to happen during the next 21 days. I'm at the edge of a committed free-fall into change, which lifts my guttiwuts into my throat as surely as the first drop on a good wooden roller coaster.
There are days when it's more real than others, and this is one of those: Bob the Cat, sleeping with big fat comfort on the end of this futon-couch, has no idea that in four months or so she'll be in a strange place, with a strange new person. I won't be looking up at these fake ceiling beams and detesting the textured crap-paint that surrounds them. No more trash night, no more recycling on alternate Tuesdays. No more waiting for the creek to flood the basement in the Spring. No more books on bookshelves, no more music studio, no more mortgage. I'm swapping it all for an unknown, a journey that, for now, is best represented by a set of maps.
Sometimes, I can see myself getting literally sick for home, for this place. I imagine what it will be like on the bad days - after a week's worth of rain, when all my gear is soaked, and I'm hidden in a patch of rhododendron off of some country road or stuck in a motel room in a town I've never heard of that's in a state I've never been to before. But I'll be homesick for a home that no longer belongs to me, for a life that I've given up. I wonder what that will be like...but I try not to wonder too much. It's important, now, to stay somewhat focused, lest the sweeping potential of transition carry me away and, paradoxically, prevent me from doing what I need to do to bring it about in actuality.
January 12, 2006
Huh. That Went Well.
Now that it's the First Quarter of 2006, corporations are starting up with their projects, which means that Your Humble Head is suddenly in demand again after a few quiet months. I had an interview today that went well enough to put me within a hairs' breadth of a new gig.
Which is good - new cash flow means getting almost entirely out of debt before the wad o' house money comes to me, which means that it's a real wad instead of a wad I've already blown, and I can then take most of said wad and use it on the trike trip.
It's also bad - the gig is entirely on-site, so after having had many weeks of bumming-around time during which I could have been getting the house ready for market, I'm suddenly going to be away on a job for five days a week. D'oh!
On balance: right now, I'd rather have the craziness and the cash than lots of free time and no cash. I'm ready to get back into the game...if only to provide appropriate contrast to how entirely out of it I will be.
This is one of those times when it's vital to have a good realtor. We're using the same realtor we used when we bought this place three years ago - and it took us a year to find it, so we've known her for four years. We can call her and say "Waugh! We're freaking out!" and she will walk us through a plan to get everything done. And, in the regular timeflow outside of this written narrative, we've made that very call. So, what I was going to write at the beginning of this post is now irrelevant.
And there you have it. The bloggish mundanity is upon me! And it will remain so until I get more nifty gear for the trip.
Hoo-ha!
January 13, 2006
Mmmm...audibly...
Now this right here is one of them there grooovy ideas: clothing made out of woven recording tape that produces audio when you scan it with a tape head:
She knitted a pre-recorded tape into potholder-shaped prototypes by hand. Later she tried a commercial loom and found her eighth-inch wide cassette tape fit onto it perfectly. Soon she began weaving tape with cotton.
Her first try yielded two yard-long panels that, for all she knew, would never make a peep.
Then one day in 2002, another artist suggested running a Walkman tape head over the fabric. They extracted a sound piece from a Walkman and mounted it on a block of wood. Moving it across the fabric, Santoro heard the cumulative noise of five tracks of sound.
I have no practical use for this whatsoever. But I loved reading about it.
January 16, 2006
Astonished Head #49
January 17, 2006
The Big Wacky
Right now, I hate the US tax code about as much as anyone can hate anything, except for maybe Hitler. That man could work up a hatin'.
America's the Land Of Opportunity and so on...unless of course you actually demonstrate some entrepreneurship and go into to business for yourself, and which point the IRS shows up at your door with a three-foot dildo and a Folger's coffee can that used to have lube in it, but doesn't anymore, so sorry, please remove your trousers and bend over.
I am having to undergo the most amazing fiscal contortions in order to get a proper hourly for the project I'm about to be on: the project brokerage company offers the rate, fine, good, but won't pay me on a 1099 unless I'm incorporated, which I'm not. This is because a bunch of trial lawyers decided it would be good to sue Microsoft on behalf of all the poor exploited contract workers everywhere, and a judge agreed with them, so now I - not feeling exploited in the slightest - have to jump through Eight Million Firey Hoops Of Taxable Death. The wage the broker would pay on a W-2 is 9% lower (to cover their "costs," y'see, blah blah), and I lose a significant portion of my self-employment write-offs, because I the W-2 makes me an "employee" of the brokerage firm for three months. But I don't want to be an "employee" just to satisfy some random nomenclatural gnome who sits in their Legal Department eating bagels and farting. Because I'm a freelancer, goddamit. Get it? The Fed sure as hell doesn't.
So I'm now trying to locate an umbrella corporation that will kick me a 1099 (for a percentage, of course). I may end up living in New York, working in New Jersey, and getting paid by a corporation in Dallas.
Yeah, this is certainly the way to encourage that American Pluck, isn't it? Good god, how I hate the bureaucrats, sitting on their spotty bottoms in the Capitol and squeezing blackheads while those of us with the Big Idea have to actually work for a living under the stinking pile of rancid clinging offal that is the cumulative output of the legislative process.
Of course, this particular bit of Incredible Pain In My Ass is only for the next three to four months.
But it should not be this difficult. Nobody has the right to complicate my life this much. It's enough to make me...I don't know, go live on a bicycle or something.
So the solution, it seems, has already presented itself, and in fact! In deed! I am preparing for it. These are just obstacles...the last grasping tentacles of The Machine! But I have the method. Their Taxing Frog style is no match for the way of the Pissed-Off Badger Claw. Bastards.
Bastards!
Now. I must go tap more of my growler full of Hop Rod Rye.
Then, I will paint the dining room ceiling with the ale-calmed proficiency of one who knows that this, too, shall pass.
(Bastards.)
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UPDATE:
I rest my case.
On the bastards' fat heads.
January 18, 2006
The Lesser Wacky
That was so much harder than it needed to be. I'm puking blood, here.
Short version: after much contortion and no small amount of good will on the part of my new project broker, I am getting paid how I want, at the rate I want, and I'm getting it bi-monthly instead of net 30.
I have triumphed over the bastards...for now. There's always more bastards on the way. Hiding out in the sofa, or in the shed. They breed.
But: I must get me hence to the dining room, and apply minty green paint.
January 19, 2006
Now I'm An Athlete
 You wouldn't know it to look at me, or the Wolaver's IPA I'm nursing, but I am a person of athletic inclination. I suspect that my early diagnosis of "hyperactivity" was actually an attempt by the Normals to suppress my mutant powers.
My experience with physical therapy for my meniscally-challenged knee is starting to bring these powers forth. Attitudinally, that is. Physically, I'm still something of a lump, remarkably sedentary considering that in four months or so I'll be leaving on a long, leg-powered journey. But my physical therapists keep using terms like potential and performance and strength training, so I'm beginning to think of the trip in terms of athletic endeavor in addition to personal growth and life experience. This here body has to power me across the Rocky Mountains! That means I need to get it off its beer-soaked ass and onto the bike.
As always, practicalities intrude: winter, for starters. My Street Machine has no fairing, so it's a tough to work up the motivation for what is certain to be a liver-chilling ride. That will change a bit once the trike actually gets here, because it does have a fairing. It will keep my poorly-insulated feet out of the frigid airflow and shield my chest from its warmth-sucking impact. There's also the strong New Wheels! motivation...and this is a must-ride-me trike, low to the ground, with two steerable wheels in the front, creating the big zoomy fun-style riding experience.
There's also work: I start my new project gig tomorrow, and that means my days of unlimited free time are now over. I have to fit training, physical therapy, and selling a house into evenings and weekends.
Today, though, I truly became a performance-oriented individual. The left knee, which originally prompted this course of physical therapy, is progressing nicely. The right knee, which was on its way to developing a meniscal tear that mirrored the left, has developed some sort of inflammation in the medial hamstring, coupled with some bursitis at the top of the tibia where the tendon connects. I could keep working it in therapy, but it's gotten worse since I started. The solution? Steroid injection! A big fat needle right into the tendon sheath, like a warhorse quarterback in the locker room at half-time.
Sort of.
The idea is to reduce the swelling and sensitivity so that I can properly build up the muscles in the leg and thus stabilize the entire knee. If it works - which it probably will, it already feels better - I'm probably going to get shots in both knees a couple of weeks before I leave in May. I'll also be carrying a supply of the anti-inflammatory Mobic, which was so effective when I injured my knee back in April. Hopefully, I won't need it.
Today the journey seems more like a reality, and less like a mere plan. My orthopedist and my physical therapists are like support staff, helping me prepare the machinery of my body. I'm working on tuning up my legs, I'm being injected with steroids, and in a couple of weeks I'll start my regular riding regimen. Today, finding myself unaccountably annoyed with painting the dining room, I started visualizing: each brush stroke brought me that much closer to the day when I'll pedal away from the beach in Yorktown, Virginia, starting off on a bona-fide adventure.
And that made minty green paint adventurous, too.
January 20, 2006
On-site
Which means I'm billing.
So I can't blog.
Because that would be wrong.
This is only a little wrong.
But I should stop now.
Before I burn in hell.
January 21, 2006
I Am Not An Athlete
 That guy right there...he's an athlete. That's Joseba Beloki after he broke his leg, wrist, and elbow in a nasty high-speed crash during stage 9 of the 2003 Tour de France. It took many shattered bones to take that guy out of the race.
We had unseasonably good weather today, so I hitched the trailer to the Street Machine and hauled about fifty pounds' worth of clothing to the donation dumpsters about three miles outside of town. The legs, they were working fine (especially the right one, with its steroid-enhanced knee). The shoes, they hurt my arches, which could be a problem unless they mold to my feet a bit more. And my heart...ugh. Apparently I now have the cardiovascular development of a veal calf.
Not surprising, really. I haven't been on the bike much, and the physical therapy has been mainly focused on strengthening my legs and stabilizing my knees. But it's disconcerting to reach the top of a long, gentle hill with little protest from your legs, but with your heart pounding and your breath hot and gaspy. Winter or no, I must get on the bike as often as possible. Given my new consulting project, that means either night rides in the February dark, or getting up absurdly early to do frigid morning rides.
I'm sort of attracted to the morning ride idea: I would feel productive and dedicated. And I know that once I hit the road, I'll be waking up with the sun as it illuminates my tent, so I might as well get used to starting the day earlier. In fact, I'm very attracted to the concept...it has the same what the hell are you thinking? vibe as the entire cross-country trip. So it must be a good idea.
We'll see. Right now, all I know is that some time around June or July, I'll be pedalling a fully-loaded trike across the Rocky Mountains, and I damn well better be up to it.
January 22, 2006
You've got...leprosy!
Not really.
But I thought I'd alarm you.
Or something.
January 23, 2006
Shhh! I'm On-site Again
(They said if I kept showing up here and doing stuff, they'd give me money. I don't want to queer the deal, see, so I've got to be quiet, and do work-style tasks. More later, maybe.)
January 24, 2006
Lord Help The Corporate
I find it amazing that large mega-corporations - and I've worked for some of mega-est - manage to function at all, let alone make any money. Once the corporate enterprise reaches a certain size, humans gathered together and encubicled exhibit behaviors that in nastier, more brutish, and shorter times would've gotten Ogg the Lumpen-Browed killed before he managed to breed, thus removing his predisposition for falling into boiling mud pits full of sharp sticks from the gene pool.
Case in point: today I discovered that my current gig is of the Save Our Asses Please variety. This isn't unusual - you don't always know what you're getting into, because the client isn't always as descriptive as they should be with the brokering agent. This particular project deals with compliance issues and, once upon a time, had six months allocated to its completion. Managerial insensibility and refusal to provide appropriate internal staff resources now leaves Your Humble Consultant with three weeks to complete said project.
The result? Less comprehensive deliverables, purchased at considerably greater cost, that will have to be revised or recreated within a year.
Now, I'm not really complaining. This sort of thing is my bread and butter.
But when corporations bitch and moan about the fiscal burdens of compliance legislation? Two-thirds of it (at least) is their own damn fault.
January 25, 2006
Is There Anything
...more amusing than a raging, half-naked circus clown strung out on crank staggering desperately down the median of the parkway in a futile attempt to catch the gleeful trio of tumbling Russian midget acrobats who have stolen his balloon pants and his big floppy shoes?
I certainly don't think so, but that's just me.
Also, it could've been a bunch of ducks, or an ice cream truck.
I was driving pretty fast.
January 26, 2006
Waaurgh!!!
An 11-hour day. It's the sort of thing that build esprit de corps among the beleaguered corporate cogs who are routinely saddled with completing monstrous tasks in too little time, and it builds credibility for me as a Fix-It Guy. I don't mind so much - I get a second wind around 4:00 or so, and pulling the big days once or twice a week during the course of the contract adds up to an extra six days' pay at the end, which is nice.
Now, though, I am kicking back, watching the tube, and enjoying an excellent bottle of Trappistes Rochefort 8, brewed by the monks of the abbey of Our Lady Saint Remy. So far, it's my favorite of the various Trappist-style Belgian ales I've been drinking over the past month or two. I like a bit more poppy carbonation than is strictly fashionable, and this is full of wunnerful bubbles plus the complex character for which the brewmeister monks are generally known. Yummish!
At the moment, there are only about 15 monks secluded at the abbey, and they're all getting elderly. I truly believe that their way of life lends a crafted, nourishing quality to their product, the exact components of which remain a mystery. Even the brewers themselves are ciphers, existing, for the most part, in humble anonymity before God and the great copper tuns:
The only thing we know about the recipes, is that water coming from a well inside the monastery walls is used and that some coriander is added in the boiler; two malt- and hopspecies are used; sugar candy is added and the label also specifies 'unmalted grains'. According to the abbey the beer has to rest 6, 8 or 10 weeks (according to the product) before it is ready for consumption. The brewers are unknown to the public world. We know that brother Antoine, who was a brewer in Rochefort till a couple of years ago, moved to the Achelse Kluis, to work on the development of the new beers there, together with Brother Thomas of Westmalle. There are some nice pictures of him in his brewery, which are published in Michael Jackson's 'Great Beers of Belgium'. His successor in Rochefort is Brother Pierre.
It's quite possible that this fine ale, brewed by these contemplative seekers of God, will eventually vanish from the earth.
A sad day, that!
January 27, 2006
Yeah, Like You'd Post Something
It's Friday night and I'm tired and the sleepies are assaulting me.
Really.
Each yawn is like a fist to the jaw.
January 29, 2006
This House May Try To Kill Us
 We've been good to this place. We've spiffed it up to the best of our budget. We tried not to inflict the kind of half-assery upon it that its previous owners often did. But I think the house doesn't want us to leave.
It started within a week of making the decision to sell it: the roof began to leak. So, we put a new roof on, at great expense, in anticipation of its value as a selling point.
Then, one of the doors on the cabinet above the stove fell off. So I clamped and glued it.
Next, a washer in the kitchen faucet - the kitchen faucet we installed three years ago - gave up its little rubber ghost. So I replaced that, and a few days later the hard plastic seal in the center faucet swivel cracked. Now the faucet doesn't drip, but water squeezes out from around its base. The plastic seal doesn't appear to be replaceable, so we'll need to get a new faucet.
Yesterday, another door on another kitchen cabinet came off. I had just finished detailing the dining room: I sponged the last of the spackle dust out of the crevises in the molding and Swiffered the floor, and suddenly I'm standing in the kitchen with a busted cabinet door in my hand, feeling like a jerk. Thanks alot, house. See if I do something nice for you again.
I hope we can sell the place and get all of our stuff out before it collapses upon itself like the house at the end of Poltergeist, taking us and the cats along with it.
January 30, 2006
This Day Met My Ass In Battle, And My Ass Lost
I do believe that the designated syllables for this episode shall be gluargh [glue-argh].
I got out of bed, showered, rented a car, drove 75 miles, never quite woke up despite a few cups of office coffee, did some stuff involving risk assessment matrices, drove another 75 miles in the other direction, went to physical therapy where I rode a recumbent stationary bike and lifted weights with my legs, loaded boxes of books into storage, dropped off the rental car, went grocery shopping, came home, sat down, and cracked open a nice smoky bottle of Innis & Gunn.
And, because it's a Monday and there's still stuff left to do, there may also be a much smaller bottle of Thomas Hardy's Ale in my immediate future. And I really don't care that I rattled the bottle, I'm not going to wait 48 hours until the grotty sediments settle back to the bottom where they belong.
Instead, I will drink of them, and revel in their sedimentality on my teeth! Oh yes.
Gluargh!
January 31, 2006
State Of The Onion
I had some longer comments, but I'm not very motivated and I'm suffering from a lack of snacks.
Suffice it to say: even though I already knew that Cheney is an unstoppable killing machine, it is always impressive to see him scale the chamber wall, then drop onto Ted Kennedy's head from the cuppola and squash it like a giant, gin-soaked jalapeno popper.
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