foomart foomart

Greetings from Glasgow! The commute went fine, the weather is gray, the food has been wonderful, the beer's even better (they call the stuff bitter, but that's such a misnomer), and I'm already covered in glitter and smelling like a hippie bordello thanks to a visit to Lush. I will write in horrendous detail of my travels once I get back, but this is just to let you know I got here safely and all is well. 11:40 AM

I'm leaving tomorrow, and should be a whirlwind of non-computer activity between now and then. The radio will be down for the duration, and I'm not sure I'll be able to update this site from the road. I will try, but just in case, I don't want to leave a post about suicide on the top of the page. So here is an inspirational quote for you, from Henry Ford:

Think you can, think you can't. Either way you'll be right.

6:32 PM

And here's where I write something mean about a dead person I've never met.

So many people have so much to say about Elliott Smith, how beautiful and fragile he was and how the big mean world was just too much for his gentle soul and how inevitable and romantic it was that he chose to solve the problem by sticking a knife in his chest. Oh, bullshit. The way I read it, we're meant to learn something in this lifetime. Maybe that lesson takes place in the form of a hard life, like you're born with no legs, or you live a short life foraging for scraps of rotten food with flies crawling on you and no clean water, or maybe you're a sensitive musician with a successful career and a shitty batch of brain chemistry. The whole fucking point is to live through it, to find a way around whatever it is. Flipping the board over mid-game is the only way to really and truly lose. Even if you stay on the same square your whole life, even if you go backwards, you haven't lost as long as you keep playing. Suicide means flip! your little pawn is gone under the couch, nothing left but a click and a rattle through an eventual vacuum hose. Game over, you lose. He lost.

You know what? Maybe he had a hard time because he wore those stupid brown corduroys all the time. There's never been a documented case of things going well for someone in brown corduroys. All these people seem to care so deeply about the guy now, but where were they when he was shopping for pants?

12:18 PM

Mercy me, where has the day gone? I started off well, got a load of laundry in, fed the worms, worked the compost, watered the plants, and paid some bills...but then I downloaded the demo of iPoker and now it's dark outside. It's a good thing they don't take PayPal; if I'd been able to pay for this thing quickly and with PayPal play money, and subsequently gained the ability to play 95 different games, not just the demo's 7-card stud, I don't think I would have stopped to eat lunch. I totally get where the Earl of Sandwich was coming from. It's a darn good thing I don't play for real money. Speaking of which, my chips came in. They're good heavy clay ones, not the Tiddlywinks d'antan, and they nestle just so in their adorable little attaché case. Sadly, I'm not thrilled with the contrast of two of the colors; the gray is as ginchy as I thought it'd be but unfortunately it's also fairly dark, so in low light the color might be a little too close to the black ones. I will buy another, more contrasty, color when I get back. Either yellow, to round out the Metro colors, or green, for the land, Africa. Haven't decided yet which flag to rally round. 7:01 PM

I guess I've arrived. Scumsucking spammers w00d13 and p3@¢#3S have added me to their fake blogroll. I'm honored to be in the company of some of the other excellent sites that got infested by this latest scam. Whatever; it's one link to me, and none to them. I sure am glad I never enabled any kind of comments here.

Dear spammers, die, and faster, please.

10:10 AM

Small roof update: B contacted John Ringel, of Jersey Devil and Yestermorrow design-build fame, and he's actually interested in working with us to redesign the solaria! Unfortunately, the evil Lady Douchebag has become the contact person for the condo on this one, and I fear she'll try to poison everything that's good and right in her quest to build the suburban tract home of her dreams. I've ordered B to stay in the loop. Hope he can, or that I can wedge myself in there somehow. I'm curious to see what the Douchebags' response will be. 9:36 AM

Loose Ends, Up-Tying of:
1. I didn't join the Joan Jett fan club. I'm thirty-six years old, for chrissakes. Still haven't located a paper copy of either a) the head-tilted picture, b) the original one I was looking for, or c) Randee St. Nicholas, but I'm still looking.
2. The piano sample I was trying to remember was, of course, from Ike's Mood. Uh-duh. I'll be mentally misplacing the Apache beat and Funky Drummer next, thanks.
3. Monitor is still alive and kicking. Turning the poor thing off at night seems to be prolonging its life.
4. Haircut's still bad, but that's pretty much a lifetime thing. I think I've had two good haircuts ever, and they were both while I was in high school. 9:35 AM

Six posts in one day? I must be having a Mannix episode. In any case, I've just gone through and changed all my double-hyphens into proper em dashes—Emily Dickinson, eat your heart out—though I'm not going to bother changing all the ...s into proper ellipses. So there. 9:25 PM

Dag nabbit. That mo-o-otherlode of music I found a couple of days ago? I'd nabbed about 2/3 of it, but today I saw that there was a new version of mlmac out there, so, naturally, I downloaded it. So did I then kill the mldonkey core? No, I did not. Did I back up my temp files or quit everything in an orderly fashion so that the .ini files would write properly and not turn into .outi files? Or take any precautions at all that might have been sensible like that? Course not. Sigh. It's easy to recreate the searches and all, and I've got all my pots baited and back in the water again...but losing an 86% complete 200 MB file just suuucks, and losing, well, let's call it several mostly-done big files? SUUUUUCKS.

On the positive side, because there is always a positive side, it located a couple of things I'd been searching for a long time ago and forgotten about, from the last time my donkeys crashed like this. So if you think I didn't have quite enough wanky Krautrock on the radio station before, well, you'll be a happy camper, you will. I'd forgotten all about that one Ash Ra Tempel record I'd been stalking. Ooh! Lucky you!

8:53 PM

Oddendum: addly enough, the package that I missed today contains... poker chips. 4:26 PM

That didn't take long. I walked down into Hoboken, finding a playing card, the Queen of Spades, on the way. Hmm, a woman with black hair and eyes*...what are the chances of me encountering one of those any time soon? In any case, it's one more card to add to the package I'll someday send to Cardhouse. Back when I was employed, I'd found a couple, both on the same corner in Manhattan but from different decks and a year apart, but never mailed them. Fortunately, I'm disorganized enough—in an organized way—that the envelope with the other two cards (Jack of Diamonds, Ace of Diamonds) is still where I left it.

Or should I keep them? Maybe I should start my own lifetime deck of found cards. I could still send the doubles to Cardhouse. And he does already have the Ace of Diamonds. At least I think I should wait and see if I can make a decent hand; my two hole cards are pretty good, and, with the Queen, I'm on a belly-buster straight draw. I think I'll stick it out at least until I see the rest of the flop.

In any case, I got my 20 pounds of hoity-toity cat food and zoomed back home lickety-split. That was the last of the alfresco errands on the list. Now all I have to do is clean and pack.

*Ok, so her eyes are green, but she does wear a lot of that black shit, so, whatever, ok?

2:37 PM

Shit! This is why I don't leave the house. I schlep up to Central Ave to copy some keys and mail them off and deposit some checks and mail some bills and go all the way to the hated Stop & Drop to buy some wacky way-out products like veggie burgers and clumping cat litter because the local bodegas don't carry that sort of thing...and, when I get back, there it is, angst incarnate on my door. They NEVER come this early. Dang. Hate that. At least the UPS guy was nice enough to fill out the "from" line on the form so I know what the package is, and that it will be fine waiting until tomorrow. And I had a nice walk, during which I noticed that somebody in this neighborhood has Miss Piggy curtains.

Guess I'll do the other errand run I have to do today instead of tomorrow like I'd planned. Off I go then.

1:07 PM

Ok, here it is in writing: I'm giving up booze for 2004. I did this with pot in 1998 and that was pretty easy—this should be more difficult unless I become even more of a hermit than I am now. I figure this gives me two months and change to develop an exoskeleton before my dry year starts.

Why? Because I should. Because I've been overdoing it lately. Because I could stand to lose a few pounds, and that's a convenient pile of carbs to sweep out. Because hangovers suck. To see if I can. To get my energy back into whack.

Why not start now? Because I'm going to Scotland in a couple of days. Because I'm going to Venezuela with that little black box in December. Because there's a beautiful ripe lime on my little tree upstairs.

10:31 AM

Gasp! They still make them! 8:32 PM

Did Lifesavers get bigger? I bought a roll of them today, to get bus change, and they look unnaturally huge. Maybe the ones we got in those Sweet Li'l Stories books were unusually small or something; I don't remember eating them much outside the post-stocking season. On the other hand, my memory is pretty bad in general, so never mind.
* * *
Man, am I out of the loop. The fuck? They took out the three good flavors and left the gross pineapple ones? What is wrong with these people? No wonder I haven't bought the stupid things since I got bored with the Wint-O-Green sparking thing. My roll today seems to be the original flavors, thank foodness. That's a nice typo/I really like it/wish I had expected it... 5:32 PM

Um, I apologize for ordering you around in the next post. Doowutchyalike. (There I go again!) 2:22 PM

I've deleted Stylin' and Smilin' from the blogroll. It's still a lovely site, and you should bookmark it, but he doesn't update frequently enough and a gal's gotta have standards. Driver Down is the next to go, as soon as I get done reading the rest of his old stuff. He's got the fourth and final installment of the jury duty story up, though, so do check it out when you get a minute. There are good discussions going on at Alas, a Blog and Making Light, so if you haven't been keeping up there, set aside some time. Really, though, they're worth checking every day, as you know if you've read them. 1:52 PM

Back home after an uninterestingly annoying commute. House is fine, cats are fine, and I got home in time to catch the mail delivery. That's all I want out of life most of the time.

I stayed an extra night in Pennsy; my brother used the magic words. ("I think it's Wing Night.") Dogged the bucket o' wings, watched the Yankees game, and slept like a rock after the day's activities. We'd closed up the pool for the winter so that meant getting all the leaves out of it, lowering the water level, draining all the pipes, scrubbing off the scummy waterline marks, taking out all the handrails, and stretching the cover over it. Took like five minutes. We also repotted a bunch of plants and brought all the potted plants in for the winter. Again, five minutes, max.

I also got to watch D turn his compost piles, which brought a wee tear to my eye...he had to use his Kubota loader to do it. The oldest one is almost completely worm castings, I think, some really excellent well-worked black gold. And it's taller than me. The middle pile is a marvelous mix of shredded leaves and grass clippings, plus the occasional corn husks and coffee grounds I sneaked in there when he and Milo weren't looking. Pretty much the compost pile people dream about when they think of compost piles. (Well, compost wackos, anyway.) Pile 3 is straight leaf mold, yards and yards of it. And he's got his leaf sucker ready for this year's cleanups, so there will be another pile soon. Droolworthy.

12:51 PM

So we went to the psychic fair and it was lovely. We went to the chakra tuning thingy and the singing bowls thingy. Felt my chakras glowing like jewels—the ones that are all working, anyway—and basically felt like a nice beer buzz all over. We went to another workshop with a friend and his singing bowls, but I was kind of distracted by the unusual effect of him glowing. I've never seen auras before but this was weird. I thought it was dirt on my glasses, or the light or something, but I took off my glasses and he moved out of the spotlight and he kept glowing. Totally weird. I didn't end up getting my past lives read, though. Much as I wanted to get read, and to know who the main players are in my current life, the guy who was there didn't seem like the guy who I wanted to find out this sort of thing from. He was kind of sketchy and I didn't like his vibe at all. So I pretended to write another name, loopily scratching out my own name where I'd signed it up on the form earlier, and we split, still energetically buzzing but that passed pretty soon.

Off to Wawa and their stuffed pretzels, and to see D blow some glass, which was totally worth the trip. We watched his instructor blow a piece for his mother, and one other guy do one of his own which changed draMAstically, to our surprise, into a lovely draped bowl thingy. Then D and another woman got to work. D gathered up an orange Peep of glass and marvered it into a bishopy glob. He got some more, smushed it into some color, shaped it, and blew it out a little before reheating it and putting some more color into it. He had these rods which he stuck his glob into and then bent around his glob. More heat, more color, more swinging the rod around, more picking up of glass—I'm sure I have the order wrong about all of this. There were a lot of stages.

In any case, something happened and his blowpipe got clogged and he wasn't able to blow the glass out as much as he originally planned. So he transferred it onto a punty and opened it up with some jacks, like making a bowl on a pottery wheel. It came out really cool, even though he was totally unhappy with it because it could have been blown out so much bigger if the pipe hadn't clogged. I thought it looked great, but what do I know. It was definitely better than the lopsided thing the other woman was working on for like hours...

After that, we went off to the 110th birthday party which was just lovely. Everybody had nametags, which we quickly vandalized, and there was wonderful food (from the same chef who'd cooked the dinner last night) and honest drink aplenty. We got back to D's house, and nobody but me was really up for meeting W and D at the local gay bar, so here I sit. Breeders...

* * *

In hindsight, this would have been a spectacularly bad idea, and I'm glad it didn't happen, much as I love W and D and gay bars.

12:02 AM

Got to Phlegmington without incident—other than finding out the bus line has made their annual switch from fuckin' freezing to fuckin' sweltering—had a dinner that couldn't be beat and the best golf wine I've ever tasted, dropped the batch of buttons furtively into a mailbox in the dead of night, and got back to D's house to see his latest creations. Impressive. He's really making marvelous stuff, and it's getting better and better technique-wise. I hope he doesn't lose the lovably crude crookedness of his old stuff has as he learns--hope he can keep the chaos in there somewhere even after he knows how to control the glass in different situations.

Tomorrow is the fair. I hope it'll be interesting, but if it sucks we're planning to split and go watch D blow glass at school. I hope we get to do that in any case, really. The fair thingy is at the Princeton Unitarian Church, and that isn't a very big building. I imagine we can cover whatever's there in a few hours. I also noticed that the guy who married B and me doesn't seem to be there anymore. Scandal? I doubt it. Not in the UU church, they're not all weird and repressed there. Yawn. I'm off to slumberland now. The radio's still working, for what that's worth, so feel free.

12:30 AM

I'm a-chargin' up the ol' MP3 player as I get ready to go to Pennsy for the weekend. I'm finally going to be able to give K the framed pictures for her bathroom, at which point she's allowed to know about this blog. Hi K!

Tonight it's dinner with the gang, then tomorrow there's some sort of psychic fair in the morning, where I'm told I'll be able to get my past lives read, and a 110th birthday soiree with some fun fabulous family friends. A good time promises to be had by all.

I'm going to leave the computer on, because I've found an absolute mo-o-otherlode of good music and want to keep the donkeys hauling as hard as they can haul this weekend. I've got two different GUIs running as well as the web-browser-based interface, so that should run for a while before they all hit snags and quit. What this means to YOU is that the radio station should work for a while, and once I get back there will be stacks and stacks of classic tracks on wax and wax for your listening pleasure.

Time to shut off the poor monitor and hit the road. I'll try to post from D's house.

2:57 PM

I went. Drank too goddamn much, spent too goddamn much, and the team lost. But I'm glad I went. Lots of other old-timers crawled out of the woodwork for this game too, more than a couple of whom found ourselves out in the parking lot before the game ended, thinking we'd personally jinxed the team and hoping that removing ourselves would lift the curse and let them score. It didn't, of course, but that's what it's like with the Metro.

Now I'm waiting for the coffee to kick in, and thinking about making another plate of scrambled eggs. I feel like Agnes Gooch.

10:19 AM

Ah, fuck it. I'm going. 2:31 PM

So far, so good today. The sun came out, I started the day with a proper double espresso, and I did all the condo money stuff, filled both orders, and put ten items into the mail. I also received my copy of Making Book. Now I've got to decide whether I should save it for the trip, because it's a nice portable paperback, or tear into it right now, because I have American willpower.

The other decision I need to make is whether to go to the Open Cup game tonight. This could very well be the game where the Metrostars finally win something real for the first time since the birth of the team. And I certainly put in my time, with perfect attendance for several years, including the dark seasons where they were utter shite and lost all the time. But since I haven't been to any games this year, because they pissed me off when they turned into the loathsome DC United, I feel wrong about going. I think if somebody else huffed like I did and came back just to watch them hoist a cup, I'd have unkind things to say about them. And I think I'd say the same about myself. Ah well, it's only an issue until 6 PM, when B's brother will sell the ticket to whoever wants it if I haven't appeared at the pub where everybody's meeting up. I think I won't go. I'm pretty sure they'd lose if I did anyway. Just cuz.

1:34 PM

It's howling and pissing rain out there tonight. I'm glad to be safe inside with a purring furrball on my lap.

I should be filling a couple of orders to go out tomorrow, but nothing is touching this caffeine headache today, and that includes a nap, water, aspirin, Reiki, and even caffeine. Only one of the orders really needs to go out tomorrow, actually, and it's anti-war pins, of which I have a metric kazillion made, the ones that I was going to sell on the the State College trip. Maybe I'll bang that out tonight so I can feel done for the day. I did accomplish a few things, and I actually showered and left the house this morning, which is SO unlike me. Went down to Hoboken to do some banking and buy a big bag o' meat analogues. Even with B out of the house, it's easier to deal with Quorn and Chik'N Things (the best food ever) than actual chicken. Plus, y'know, karma and guilt and hormones and all that.

Got back home, fixed the fugly Blogrolling thingy over there and changed the color of all the links on this page so my mom can see them. Then I paid all the household bills, sent off my sales tax forms, balanced the checkbook and considered refinancing the mortgage. I would have done more along that line, but the forms on my lender's website don't like me, or Macs. I'll call them tomorrow. Maybe. I'm not too good at that whole picking-up-the-phone thing.

I also borrowed some tasty new (to me) music from my friends on the Internet. Funky old Bollywood soundtrack music, really good angsty flamenco, a Salif Keita album I didn't have, some ancient ska and a weird Dinah Shore song. I've been borrowing everything I can get my grubby little paws on lately, because this wonderful open tap of music is just too good to last, even though I'm pretty sure the ARR! AI! 'EY! 'EY! wouldn't be interested in any of the stuff that I actually listen to/play on RFF. (Tune in and cleanse your aural palate.)

In a totally-unrelated music question, where the hell is the piano sample from that's used in LL Cool J's 6 Minutes of Pleasure? Damn, it's on the tip of my brain and I can't place it.

I added Alas, a Blog to my blogroll list today, check it out. Good stuff there.

11:31 PM

Yuck, the new blogrolling thingy I just put in looks heinous in IE. Sorry, I'll fix it in the morning, but for now...well, if you're using IE you need to get another browser anyway, so do that. 1:10 AM

Sorry I haven't posted much lately. All I want to do is sleep and eat these days. I'll snap out of it soon. 5:14 PM

The radio's down for a couple hours while B does some audio editing on my machine. It should be back later on tonight. 9:47 PM

How cute is this baby hedgehog? 5:38 PM

You know who's funny? Dong Resin. 2:17 PM

The bad news: Lord and Lady Douchebag are at it again.
The good news: there is an electric dinosaur on my desk. Thanks, Mom! 1:28 PM

I'm baa-aack!

Thursday morning we got a ride with Charlie the accordion player. I know, I know. The plan was for us to rendezvous with the accordionist at the Jersey side of the Holland Tunnel. I was IMing with a friend just before we left and told her that, not realizing how cloak-and-dagger it sounded. He was a little early and we were right on time, so it worked out well. We hopped into the accordionist's Porsche and zoomed off through Jersey City. His radio was tuned to a sports channel where some guys were doing the post mortem on the Yankees loss the night before. Charlie asked us if we followed baseball/the Yankees, we said we didn't and explained we liked soccer, so we talked about baseball and the Yankees for a while. At some point we took the wrong exit onto the Pulaski Skyway, but once we fixed that it was a smooth trip.

We didn't talk much at first, sports and weather mostly, but eventually we found some common ground in our feelings about children and pets. Naturally, we also exchanged accordion jokes. I say exchanged, but of course he already knew all the ones I could remember from the Jazz Years. He told a few more, but I'm certain we barely scratched the surface. I think a sense of humor is a pretty strong requirement if you want to go into the squeeze box biz. That, and a normal disdain for trombone players. I wonder who they joke about?

We drove on, Clifton Chenier blasting happily, past the muted olives, golden reds and mustardy oranges of the Pennsylvania fall foliage which is probably a week away from hitting its peak of color. It was lovely, though, in a subtle way. The trees were in the process of changing and there were fascinating gradations even within individual trees.

So to answer the question of a few days ago, State College, PA is right near the Jersey Shore. Wha—? We finally turned off Route 80 and were immediately surrounded with the smell of—well, not just cow manure, though that was a big part of it—cows. Living, breathing, all-sorts-of-stuff-excreting cows. Milk. Cheese. CHEESE. That was it. "Smells like fresh dairy air," Charlie quipped.

We couldn't find a load-in door at the venue, so we went to the hotel, where the rest of the band was waiting. Nora is taller than I'd imagined, slim and stylish in t-shirt and jacket and jeans. She was wearing an anti-war button which she thought was one of mine, but it wasn't. It was one of the Donnelly/Colt 7/8" lithographed buttons that I'd give my eyeteeth to be able to make. She also had on, and this is extra weird, a 1.5" button, black with the words AND NOW? on it. Not one of mine! Echo must have reprinted them (poorly (mrow)) or somebody else must have ripped them off. Go figure. I wanted to examine it and see if there was any contact info on the edge, but by the next time I thought about it, it had fallen off her blazer and been lost. Very weird indeed.

So to the venue. I went up and sat with B at the FOH desk and everybody started to set up. The band set up their instruments—instruments! actual instruments! and sheet music! It's been a while since I've seen that. I noticed that Nora took off her shoes for the soundcheck and was wearing striped socks. And now I have to talk about her hair for a minute. The woman has really good hair. It was casually pinned up on top of her head up until now, but she took the comb out and it all tumbled down just perfectly. She combed her hair out briefly, taking the loose strands out of the comb and putting them in her purse (!) and then she did that skritchy shaky finger thing and it cascaded, just cascaded into a perfect mane. I was awed, sitting there like I was with my Homemade Ass haircut. I don't understand it, it's just long straight hair, parted down the middle, but it doesn't lie limply on her head, somehow. Magic or money? Maybe it's a $500 haircut and I'm just not able to recognize that. It is the same kind of effortless look that people of means achieve via lavish applications of well-seasoned money. Given her lefty-liberal subject matter, though, I dunnno-- but she does have a very rich look about her. Even in jeans she looks like she just got off her horse after a dressage exhibition. Maybe she just has good posture.

The venue was hyperefficiently run by a caffeinated stage manager with Simply Red hair. He had Jack Black's manic specificity but was more friendly and less arch. The guy was familiar with every inch of that place and every jack on every piece of equipment. He was assisted by a couple of pale, taut crew guys and an overwhelmed lighting tech. During the sound check I overheard her desperate phone call "I need help, I've been awake for 48 hours and I don't know where anything is..." followed by muffled curses as she repeatedly batted me in the back of the head with her lighting plot. She had to adjust some of the lights at one point and got out an extending ladder. She stood it up okay but was completely unable to figure out the whole pull-the-string method of raising the top half of the ladder. It teetered and lunged as the band tried to focus on the changes Nora was making while keeping one eye on that ladder. The stage manager finally sent one of the pale guys down to "go help her out before she kills somebody." He extended the ladder and she managed to get it onto the pipe. She shakily climbed up to adjust the offending instrument, then climbed back down and bonked it out of whack when she tried to move the ladder. Back up she went, back down she went, BONK the ladder went. She and the pale guy ended up using the ladder to knock the instrument back into place. Quality! Here's a photo of the scene, sorry it's blurry but I'd turned the flash off.

Sound check went well other than the terrifying ladder ballet, and everybody went their separate ways to eat or rest before the show.

We went back to the hotel where I hoped they'd be hip and modern and have free high-speed internet connections. No such luck. The lamp on the desk had a phone jack. A PHONE JACK. Darn, and I'd left my acoustic coupler and 300-baud modem at home under a pile of 5" floppies. I wish we'd had an AirPort card. It's a college campus, you just know the aaaaaair iiiiiiis humminnngngggg. So I watched the Weather Channel and did some yoga while B took a power nap.

Back to the venue, where I was supposed to meet up with Nora's sister to set up and sell buttons. I waited in the green room with the band and made a few circuits of the theater, but didn't find Nora's sister or any place to set myself up. At some point I realized that the house was already open anyhow, so I said screw it and went back to my seat up by the sound board. The webcasting guys had set up their camera over the seat next to me so I figured it was a good place to sit. Okay, now let's play a little game. The house is about 30 percent full at this point. Lots of empty seats everywhere. I'm all the way up in the last row next to the video camera. When five towheaded sproglets come in, which five seats do you think they sat their squirmy little selves down in? Bonus points if you can guess where their handlers ended up. (hint: not in the same row) Grr. I hope the webcasting people used the sound from the other camera, since I'm pretty sure they didn't get a feed off the board like they should have. If you listened to the webcast and most of it sounded like crinkling plastic, that was the two sproglettes fighting over the bouquet, the tattered remains of which they'd later deliver to Nora at encore time.

The performance started. Nora came out, kicked off her little slippers, and did the whole show barefoot. She'd changed into a weird lavender jacket that didn't do a thing for her. She'd also put on her stage makeup and I was horrified to realize that from where I was sitting she looked just like Ann Coulter. Eew! The show went smoothly, and she introduced B a couple of times as a member of the band. Aww. The webcasting guy (whose iBook I'd borrowed to post the previous post, btw) told me that the webcast will be archived and should be up in a couple of days, so if you missed it you've got another chance. They should have the sound fixed, too.

After the show, the band took their gear back to the hotel and we all went over to a local bar. B and I got there first, having walked over with Nora's sister who lived in the area. There was a lot of confusion about where the group should sit, and in the course of hanging around, the woman from the college who was kind of organizing things told us that we could sit in that area, but that the big table there was really for the band. Hee. Clearly somebody wasn't paying attention to the introductions. We smiled and sat at the bar, not wanting to make a fuss. Ordered a pint of beer for B and a Stoli and soda for me. Cost for the round: $3.50! I LOVE college towns. I like the way the college people always look the same, the short, long-haired girls, hippy with the Freshman 15, and the skinny, messy-haired boys in loose jeans and dirty sweaters. And you gotta just love a cheap bar. The hugely-popular house drink was a thing called a Car Bomb: a pint glass 3/4 full of Guinness, and a shot glass with half Jameson's and half Bailey's. The victim drops the shot, glass and all, into the Guinness and guzzles the whole foaming mess down in one go. I saw the bartenders make dozens of these things. I can't imagine how nasty the floors must get in that place. Urk. The organizing woman was set straight at some point about who B was, and the college picked up our tab. And the Yankees won.

Back to the hotel, where we watched a bunch of the Democratic debates (will somebody please tell Joe Lieberman he's a fucking albatross?) and went to sleep.

Got up in the morning, red-eyed and bushy-tongued, showered, and headed off to the local Tex-Mex place for some Brex-Mex. They were closed, though, so we ended up at "The Corner," which looked like a bar but was serving breakfast. A quick feeding and back to the room to pack up and check out. We rode back with Nora and the drummer in her minivan. She pointed out the correctional facility where Mumia Abu-Jamal is being held as we passed it and gave us some t-shirts her sister had made. (She'd been wearing one yesterday which said LUCID across the front and I'd admired it. The ones she gave us, though, said BEAUTY on them. Ah well, gift horse, you know.) We drove back through the scenic fog and lovely foliage, stopping at a local diner for some meh food and good-natured schmoozing with the seasonally-festooned waitress. Got back to Bergenline Ave. where B and I picked up the bus back home past the Colombian bakery, the Argentinian bakery, and the (I didn't see this one last time) Guatemalan bakery. We have really got to get back there sometime when we're not rushing somewhere else. Home again, home again, and if you read this whole thing it's a miracle.

12:33 PM

Just a quick note: the show tonight will be webcast. If you want to watch it, go here and I'll post much more later. 4:45 PM

This is weird. I tried to upgrade my Blog*Spot membership to the next level up to get rid of the big ad at the top of this blog page, because I love you and want you to have the nicest possible experience when you come to my site. But Blog*Spot wouldn't let me upgrade; I got an error message that they were working on somethingorother each time. So I sent an email, which based on Blogger's history, I don't expect to ever get read. I never got an answer, never was able to use the upgrade form... but the ad seems to have vanished anyway. I'm not asking and not telling. 1:46 AM

So I've decided to go to State College, PA, wherever that is, to sell buttons at the Nora York show. I wasn't gonna, but hey, she asked me to go, it's a free trip and hotel room, and I've never been to State College, PA, wherever that is. And I might even make a couple bucks.

I came up with a design I like for the other button job I'm doing this week, so that's some pressure off as well. I have to submit an invoice tomorrow for that job I lost the emails about, and then the week suddenly goes from Total Money Sink to Not Too Bad, Actually.

I will check the radio tomorrow just before I leave, but, as we know, it likes to just stop for no reason. If it does that, sorry, and I'll start it back up again on Saturday when I get back from State College, PA, wherever that is.

1:34 AM

oh please oh please oh please 10:25 PM

Woohoo! Just pre-ordered the new Bob the Angry Flower book! If you don't visit BTAF on a regular basis, you should. There's a new strip there every Friday. If you're a fan of Milk and Cheese or Hothead Paisan, Bob's right up your alley. Or even if you're not, really. 5:25 PM

Man, my monitor is really circling the drain at this point. Between the last post and this one, it's gone black and come back on 30 or 40 times. Not good. I'm really ready for Apple to release those new ones now, thanks. 3:32 PM

I'm doing the drinking-water thing again today, and have learned a few things. The average human bladder has a capacity of from 7 to 13 ounces of liquid, depending on who you ask. Beyond water sports, there is a whole sexual subset out there of people, who really enjoy the feeling of having to pee, some of having to pee to the point of desperation, some who enjoy peeing copious quantities and some who are into expanding the capacity of their bladders to some really frightening degrees. I'm not linking to any of this for obvious reasons--you can use Google if you really want to know. 3:14 PM

It's been proven by scientists:

My little brother rocks.
Thanks, dude man. 1:23 PM

They're predicting Schwarzenegger is going to take California. You stupid fuckers. 12:48 AM

So I downloaded a widget today which reminds me to drink 8 glasses of water each day, like one should. I, of course, being myself, decided to use a pint glass as the glass in question, and I just finished the 8th glass for today.

Now, if you'll excuse me...

11:18 PM

Recipe Corner!

Stoopid-Easy Chocolate Tofu Pie
1. Melt 1 bag of chocolate chips over low heat.
2. Put in blender or food processor with 1 block of tetra-pak tofu and a splash of vanilla.
3. Blend until smooth.
4. Pour into storebought graham cracker crust.
5. Chill for a couple hours.
6. Eat pie!

It's not exactly good for you, but it's not all that bad for you either, especially considering it's a delicious dessert.

9:29 PM

Blogjog™ has made it onto Google! I'd like to thank all the little Googlebots who made this moment possible. 1:08 PM

Hm. Having spent an awful lot of time yesterday sorting my music into genres, I've changed my mind about that. It's really of very little use as far as iTunes is concerned. Now I'm thinking about re-sorting them all. Maybe I'll dump them back into the big folder they're in, or maybe I'll segregate them into 28 folders, one for each letter of the alphabet, one for numbers and punctuation, and one for compilations. The genre folders did come in handy for one thing; I dumped the folders into iTunes as individual playlists, and from there it was easy to select all the files and quickly tag the genre of all of them. I could have used MP3 Rage to do the same thing, but it's slower than iTunes for jobs like this. It does have a lot more power, though--if you're a hyperorganized Mac user, I highly recommend it. You can use it for all sorts of juju on non-music files as well. In any case, I can use iTunes's "smart playlists" now that I've got the genres tagged, and it won't matter what kind of folder arrangement I end up using in the Finder. I sure do wish Apple would get it together and do "linked playlists" like Audion does. They've had that feature for years. You just point it at a folder and it whips up a playlist based on the folder contents. If you add stuff to the folder, the playlist updates just like magic. It's such a basic feature and I have no idea what's holding Apple back from implementing something similar.

I do know that the radio is down right now. It's got nothing to do with all this iTunes stuff, I'm just waiting for some big downloads to finish before I give my machine the restart it wants so badly.

12:48 PM

Good grief. I'm finally sorting my music files so that when I can control the music on the radio station I'll be able to do it by genres, and to make it easier to create iTunes playlists. What a nightmare. I thought I'd just sort it all by genre in Finder folders, then make playlists to subsort everything, but I can't decide where to put half the stuff anyway. Latin ska? Is it Ska? World? Latin? (Decision: ska) Mutantes? Should they go under World/Brazilian or should they be in with the Nuggets and Krautrock? Or should they just go under Weird? I'm thinking it's silly to sort based on what language the song is in, so I'm trying to do it by genre. I guess I'll make a non-English playlist later so I can have non-distracting work music on tap. But what about all the albums and artists with a mix of different styles? What the heck are Orishas, are they more Rap or more Cuban? If I try to go song by song I'll go mad. I've got to draw the line somewhere. But what about the bands who've changed dramatically from album to album? I want to go back to my old convention: straight alphabetical and let god sort 'em out. Unfortunately this results in a really unworkable number of folders. Sigh.

I need a break to think about how I'll be using this and where Future Me will look for things I want to find. Coffee, then I will devote the day to detangling this. Nice to be in the leisure class...employment would cramp my style so...

1:28 PM

MP3 Sushi is nice and all, but it is NOT RANDOM. If it didn't spontaneously quit every day or three, I wouldn't notice, but it does and I do. I should have a good nonstop month of music before it has to repeat. Even assuming a normal random amount of repeating, assuming it does repeat at all, there shouldn't be more than one or two a day, if that—but I'm getting whole blocks that I will have heard a day or two previously. I'll be glad when the developer gets it hooked up with iTunes properly. Heck, I might even go big time and upgrade to iTunes 4. 12:18 AM

Oh, and how great is it that the ads on top of this page are for cheesesteaks? Ahahahaha! 11:52 PM

I've updated to OS 10.2.8 (the new one, not the buggy one from a couple days ago) and it's smooth sailing. All my connectivity stuff works just fine, and I do think the window openings and closings are zippier, as reported. Unless you hold down the shift key, which try.

B's downstairs, cooking up a big vat of rooftop-pepper tabascosis. The day's finally improving, now that there's just 11 minutes left in it; I think it was the Chinaco that turned it around. (Big up to my good friend Bart for hipping me to the stuff.)

11:46 PM

Lame day, all things considered. I missed the bus (the ONLY bus) to get to Pennsy for the tree-planting thingy. Talked to my bro online; he's been making some really nice glasses. I want a set. But he knows that. Supported the arts a bit more, then I read the Phred Felps thing which made my melancholy at missing the tree thing turn into impotent anger. I was just getting over that when I got a call from the neighbors wanting to hang out tonight. Then B got home. We cleaned and cleaned and the neighbors bailed at the last minute so we ended up with a big bowl of crab dip and a nice clean house. Result!

Unfortunately, the results did not go the way of the USWNT. Poor gals. They really aren't used to losing. I bet there's a locker room full of holes in Portland tonight.

10:45 PM

Kittens...just so the next post isn't the first thing you see today. 8:26 AM

Ugh, that evil fuck Phelps is at it again. Fortunately, the hate festering in his heart will kill him soon. And he is SO going to hell. I don't think there's a hell, really, but if the explorers of the afterlife are right, he'll be firmly stuck in the Belief System Territories with his own kind until the end of time. Once he leaves this plane, if there's any justice at all, he won't bother the rest of us ever again as we evolve through our lives. I like to think that's true, that all the intolerant bastards in this life will be penned together forever in the reject bin, and the rest of us will keep reincarnating until we as a race get it right.
* * *
Just made a whompin' donation to GLAAD, some twenty years later than I should have. I feel a little better.
* * *
And now I've read this link from Metafilter, and I'm sick to my stomach. I'm gonna go scoop out the cat box and try to get some perspective. Only follow that link if you're feeling strong and have some time. And pass it along. 8:12 AM

Well... I've changed my office around a bit, papering off a corner for splattering and banishing the cardboard boxes that have been piling up to the garage. It's still a mess, but I can walk in here without stressing out, a little. Call it feng shui if you will, it just feels better to see a surface here and there without anything on it.

I've taken frequent breaks, of course, and used at least a few of them to Support the Arts in a way that will be revealed in 5 to 10 working days. There's more art-supporting I'd like to do today, but can't think of a suitably anonymous way to do it. PayPal should work on that. "You've got cash! An anonymous benefactor has sent you X dollars to spend as you wish..."

Speaking of the arts reminds me to go check in on my condimental pal Jeff. Maybe I'll buy one of his cool new paintings and get my support-the-arts yayas out that way. I really like the Operation one, but fear it's way out of my price range.

8:48 PM

Speaking of things I want... Any and all. I wish more people ripped and shared vinyl. 8:36 PM

Snirkles! Why don't they make these anymore? This would so totally be my favorite candy. Like a whole pack of Goetze's Caramel Creams® all in one. On that site, I noticed their product Cow Tales® and am wondering why this had not been brought to my attention sooner. Must have. Same goes for the chocolate ones.

No creme filling, but I'll be looking for these when I'm in the UK later this month--who could resist something with consumer reviews like, "If i had to choose something that i had to eat non-stop until i was violently sick, then this would win without ANY competiton." Hm. I'll be in Scotland...wonder what one of these would be like DEEP FRIED?

Oh dear. Oh no. Oh my. Ruh-ro. Very bad. Possibly the worst thing I've found on the internet. I did not need to know how cheap these things are in bulk. Hoo boy.

Oh. And this. SHOOT ME NOW. Holy shit.

6:25 PM

Darn, it seems Colonel Panic wasn't quite as kind as I had thought when he visited me last week. I've lost a passel of emails, including the important one which told me how much I was getting paid for a job I did last month. Really professional, to have to write and ask about that sort of thing. Yeesh. 1:12 PM

What a nothing day. Someday I'm going to look back at days like this one and regret having wasted them. 9:18 PM

I asked, I received. Turns out there is a demo of Liquid Ledger, but it's not easily available. They were nice enough to send me a link to it, just for asking. It's save-disabled, but I'll give it a shot. I hope the developers of all the streaming "now playing" thingies are as quick and accommodating! 4:24 PM

Nuts. I was all set to post here about the latest development at the radio station, a "Now Playing" list that would have worked through iChat/AIM. It kinda sorta works, actually; if you put "radiofreefoomart" into your buddy list, the status will show the currently playing track on the radio station. UNfortunately, that track is always just Radio Free Foomart, the name of the stream. Which is a little bit boring and somewhat less than useful. The search continues for something free, easy, and that doesn't require me to upgrade my web host to a level that includes scripting ability. 2:25 PM

So I spent most of the day trying to get the finances organized. A few months ago I went through and punched in all the transactions from most of the accounts I need to know about, and sent bitter emails to people like Ameritrade and Intuit, the people who make Quicken, trying to find out why they don't have the same functionality for Mac users that they do for Windozers. They didn't answer, of course, so I think they must just be jealous. I mean, Quicken reads .qif files on both platforms. There's no reason I shouldn't be able to just download my transactions and dump them in. Vast and glorious as my bulging portfolio is, it's too much to deal with, punching in every 18-cent dividend that comes in. Maybe if I didn't let those accounts sit for a year, if I just did them every month when they came in, it'd be less of a mountain but I keep thinking one of these days they'll let us into the club and we'll be able to just hit the update button like everybody else to make it happen automagically. I believe that will happen the day after I slog through them manually. In any case, I spent today doing some of the accounts that I didn't deal with a few months ago, and I'm gearing up for a big espresso-fueled session tomorrow, punching in all the stock stuff. This is pretty much the only place that my textbook Virgo nature comes out in my life. That, and I like the pretty little graphs.

Hm. I wonder whether there are any other software packages that do any better in the online arena?
* * *
While looking for others, I came across Liquid Ledger... it sure am purty; if it had a trial version I'd be reporting on it now. I like it a lot when developers seem to listen to their users and add features accordingly.

8:30 PM

Will somebody please splain to me why there aren't any USB hubs out there with more than 8 ports on them? They say you can have 128 USB devices active at a time, theoretically--why are we all dicking around with these dinky 4- and 8-port models? Why hasn't someone come out with, say a 24-port model. It would be compact and neat and everybody would buy one. What's the holdup, people? USB 1.1, USB 2, I don't even care. I just want to have one place to plug everything in. Thank you. 12:25 PM