Category: general

Where I put something when I’m too lazy to categorize it.

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fingers crossed


Midnight on Thusrday night (early morning): Lasik-Eve.

I stayed up late to watch the season finale of Lost, and because I have no work to wake up for tomorrow – just a 10am appointment for Lasik surgery. I’m ready; ready to see. I had like four paragraphs written, but they were all boring so I’ve moved them into the bin, where they’ll get appended to shorter entries over the next week. For tonight, however, I have nothing much at all. I wanted mainly to write about how anxious I am to get this surgery done – not anxious/nervous… more anxious/excited. Maybe tomorrow sitting in a room awaiting the laser… maybe then I’ll be more nervous than excited, I dunno.

The surgery is at 10am, should last about one minute for the whole thing (cornea-cutting and eye-burning), but there’s probably a half-hour to hour of waiting and other “prep.” They dose me with some kind of sedative prior to going in, so they’ll need at least time for that to set in once I’ve arrived. The, I’m off home (Sharaun as my driver) to sleep it off. They recommend as much sleep as possible immediately following the operation, as there can be some discomfort as the anesthesia wears off – but apparently not enough to wake you if you’re sleeping. So, I plan on sacking it out for as long as possible post-op – although I’ve heard that with some folks you can even see an improvement as soon as walking out of the doctor’s office, albeit a haze-shrouded improvement.

They told me I’d be able to go to work as normal Friday, even drive myself in.

Wish me luck.

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fo rth e skae of th bolg


Beeeeerrrrppp Pfestttivaaal!!! Tlonighjt my went ot the beer ffestiveal in Germany!!! Oh people, I had such a grea time in the beer festivea;. IUt really was aewesome to tbe bone. Yoiu gon’e take to me about nthe beer festiveal, becauese it was something so good.. that ytou woudl have to be their to be able to talk to me abiut it. Right’ now i’ts in the AM time in Gernamay and I just got balc from the festivitues. Pat and i dtanlk a lot of enbeers and had a realy,. tood time. Now i”ve somc home to the hotel and I am ready to go to ebd… but I wanted to post a Dridat enry before I did. So, here is what I wil post – some was weritten before the beer festival, some was bwtiiten after the berr fersive. Enogu.

Since I like to be honest with those of you who donate precious minutes of your time reading this page, I’ll tell you straight-off that this is only Friday’s entry because of WordPress’s ability to schedule entries. I actually just pressed “publish” on Thursday’s entry – which won’t go live until 2pm PST on US Thursday, and immediately began drafting this entry for a midnight Friday auto-post. Not a bad way to blog an entire week in a condensed way. I’m sitting now in Pat’s hotel room (I don’t like to link Pat’s name to his site, ’cause it has my last name on it and I strive to keep that off the web – hey Pat, fix that), which is infinitely bigger than mine, listening to some Built to Spill on the iPod and contemplating taking a dump here instead of going to my own accommodations – his room has a bidet. It’s still Thursday morning in Germany as I write, and my belly is still pretty full from breakfast. We plan to head down the cobblestone street for a lunch outdoors, accompanied, of course, by some beer – y’know, to prep us for the 3pm customer meeting… get our minds nice and limber and whatnot.

Tomorrow we leave, but not until something like 4pm, which puts us in San Francisco around 6pm – a mere two hours later. Since we have most of the day free, we’re planning to stop over for a tour of Dachau, which I’m sure will be a sobering experience.

If you couldnt/ tell, those tw apragraphs were rtinne berfore the beer frestival – and this paragraph and the opener were wtrittn after the beer festival. The beer feasstialv was sooo awesome. Pat and I had soe much berr, that we ceased to know how mhch eer we actualle had – and ckept treindking beer depstitea out ob vious frunkeness. I want you to know that this entry was a bithc to sprrell-chjeck cbaezues I prupsoely left the drunbken fat-finerge erros intact for comedic reason.s I trulyu hope ytou enjoyed my writings from ermane. It’s like 1ma here nand Pat just called me from his hotel room (rone foloor benath me) to tel me he was “fdrunk.” CNo craop Pat, we’re both frunk…. we were, after all, at the same beer fieagvl. Until the USA poeople, I love you … please forive me.

Thhis is no koek… I really am stpyting this wayu b ecuae os the b eer. The beer has done nast y thing to my coordingaton… my finger are not doing waht my brain is telling themt o di… althog I will akdmote that I’;m playing it uup (jsut a little) fo rth e skae of th bolg.

O(MFG this new Sufjan dong is carrygin me through Germanbu… one sogn can make an entire trip… this song is sooo good.

I love tou all and I miss you alll… going to bed now.. Dave is… ooooooooooooooooty.

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on the island, all bets are off


Keaton’s in her swing, wrapped loosely in a pink blanket that defines soft, watching the mobile spin above her head while hiccuping. Sharaun ran out to do some errands and I happily traded the babble of the TV for silence and some time to write. I’m kicked back on the couch in shorts and my house slippers, thinking about how I’ll do the dishes from dinner just a little later. Tuesday night, home from a busy day at work around 6pm – had to stay late to finish “just a couple” things before heading home. Every day at work I have just enough “just a couple” things to do before I leave to keep me around until morning the next day, you just have to draw the line somewhere and cash out. I’m pretty good at drawing that line in the sand and sticking to it, and more often than not it’s right around 5pm. What am I talking about?

It’s Springtime, and my backyard is a verdant bloom of weeds again, the unending rain helping them take root in otherwise non-ideal places. They blanket the unplanted hillsides that flank my house left and rear, growing in the damp mulch. They crowd the Japanese maple, blocking out the little plot of dirt I’ve been intending to plant pretty flowers in. They have taken over, and I hate them. My only solace is in the knowledge that the summer swelter will scorch their little leaves and stems; dry up the milky sap that is their lifeblood, and leave them as brittle, crumbling shells of their former thriving selves. I hate weeds.

I have this daydream thing I sometimes do, where I sometimes dream about getting stranded on a desert island (yes, I know I’ve done the island thing over and over and over, but this one’s different). It takes me as I am now, and puts me washed up on some desolate beach far away – only I’m not alone. I’m with a woman, one that’s not my wife. The fantasy really doesn’t do much else, it’s more of a setup for the line of questions that follow. I always wonder, if I were to find myself in this situation, how would my new island life with this person unfold? I’m assuming, of course, that I am a skilled enough survivalist to provide us with food and shelter and keep us alive, and we’d have each other’s company as a ward against insanity. With all the basics of life taken care of, you’re now left with an island existence, both of you living out your days together. It’s there that my mind begins to work, to twist and turn…

At some point, this woman and you would do it, right? I mean, you’re on an island, there’s nothing but the trees and waves and coconuts to eat… It may be slow in coming: you first erect a small lean-to for shelter, later you further the bond between you by perhaps bringing her a fresh-caught fish or starting a fire with a stick. She begins to trust you, depend on you even. In my daydreams, this woman is nearly always someone I know, a friend of mine or Sharaun’s. It’s all the better if, in real life, you could never imagine yourself having a relationship with the person. But, on the island, with just the crabs and gulls and wind in the palms, all bets are off. It may start as a simple compliment – how becoming her new grass skirt is; how the berries make her hair smell good. Yes, that’s where it may start, friends, but it’s not where it ends – only the island knows where it ends.

Soon, as the reality of life on the island sets in, urges turn less survivalist and more animal. Glances are cast, body language broadcast: it’s about to be on. Then, one day (yes, it’s the bright of day – that’s the awesome thing about stranded-on-a-desert-island sex, there’s no one there to be bridled for… in fact, you can be as unbridled as you want on the island), the impossible happens: humping. Oh yes, there’s no question that the time on the island would lead to doin’ it; all desert-island roads lead to fornication – I’m convinced. The bond that the island can form is a unique one, and the island can get even the loneliest of men laid… provided they can build a fire and clean a fish. You’re Screech Powers and find yourself washed waywardly ashore alongside the fetching Kelly Kapowski? No worries my friend, the thick impenetrable layers of highschool social strata do not exist here on the island. Here, you are as boneable as AC Slater. All God’s children got game on the island.

Uh-huh, I’m aware that this is nothing more than a complex construct to daydream about humping unattainable women whom I know – and I’m OK with that because it’s not as direct as simply dreaming about an affair. At least my sex-fantasies are set in impossible situations and only happen after hard-won demonstrations of manhood and survivor/provider instinct. Only if all men had to jump through such a set of pre-daydream-sex hoops – maybe there’d be less indiscriminate humping. Sharaun’s pretty much guaranteed a faithful husband unless a friend of hers and I happen to land ourselves in the remote South Pacific… and even then I have to keep us both alive long enough for the island to make her want me. Those are pretty good odds, if you ask me.

Where that all came from, I have no idea. Goodnight.

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preoccupation


After nearly a week of pulling out all the stops trying to get uncorrupted data off my failed RAID array, I finally exhausted all my ideas and gave up. Five years of digital photos, three years of taxes, all the prank phone call compilations I’d been working on, three years of website backups, all the scans for my bootleg collection, my huge collection of MAME and NES ROMs… ugh. At least I had a backup of my music… I don’t think I’d be caught without that. All the CDs I’ve ripped, and my non-ripped collection as well; I’d’ve possibly had a stroke were all that lost. When it comes down to it, I could care less about everything but the photos. I can replace MAME ROMs, re-input prank phone calls, download bootleg scans, etc. But man, had I lost my music collection… that’d be something to be really upset about. As it is, I’m pretty bummed about losing five years of pictures – and Sharaun’s more than “pretty bummed” about it too. Owell, I’m up and running a brand new 750GB RAID5 array now – here’s to avoiding tragedy in the future. I keep hoping I’ll run across a long-forgotten DVD backup of our photos somewhere…

I just have nothing to write, I think because I’ve been single-tracked trying to get this data back – and we’ve had company in town. I think things’ll get better after tomorrow, when it’s just us and the baby… but for now, I have absolutely nothing.

Goodnight.

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revenge of the axiom

Fix this for me, I'll pay you.
I knew it, I knew it. As soon as we’ve got a nice little for-when-the-baby-comes savings built up in the bank, Dave’s First Axiom of Finance strikes: There’s no such thing as extra money.

First, the garage door breaks on Tuesday, and I was waiting until the weekend to fix it. That means Sharaun and I had both been parking in the driveway for a few nights, Friday night being one of them. Saturday morning, Sharaun had yet another all-day teachermoot which left the king alone in his castle. As she was leaving, she noticed my car door was cracked. Sure enough, I had been liberated of my stereo. Not sure if I left my truck unlocked, but it sure appears that way – that or the efficient pilferers made some non-intrusive entry; my money’s on unlocked. This latest thieving marks the fourth time Sharaun or I have had our cars rifled and lightened by crooked fingers – and the second time that it’s happened right in our own driveway. I hate the feeling you get when someone jacks your stuff… hate it. Sure, some might say it’s my fault, if indeed I did leave the doors unlocked. Bullshit. It’s not my “fault.” I may have invited it, making it unnecessarily easy, but it’s sure not my “fault” that someone can’t fight their klepto urges.

I did spend a few hours over the weekend tearing the thing apart, attempting to ditch the antiquated idea of a head-unit and integrate my iPod directly into the speakers via the existing amp. Then I remembered that the amp was bad, and I was only using it as a bridged-mono “crutch” to push the subwoofer – so that plan bombed. So now I’m gonna roll her up to the stereo place and let them have their way with it. I’m still planning to get rid of the head unit and go iPod-only into the speakers, I’m just gonna let them work their magic with those instructions rather than wracking my brain over the wiring, input levels, gain, and all that other associated crap. Shooting for an un-thievable setup where I can just take the iPod with me, leaving not but wires in the vehicle to be stolen.

Second (those two paragraphs we’re the “first”), Sharaun’s car started making the most awful noise on Sunday. It’s something that I’ve been hearing, albeit having to strain, for a while now – but that she’s dismissed as me being over-sensitive to noise (which, in fairness, I am). Now, however, the noise is indisputable – so loud it almost drowns out the stereo at high speed. Whatever it is, it sure doesn’t sound good. Thankfully, I remembered at the last minute that we’re still under warranty – I’d pushed the salesman for the 5yr/65k at no cost and won. We dropped it off late Sunday night, and’ve got my fingers crossed for something covered… otherwise I fear the cost of repair will be directly proportional to the volume of that nasty sound.

But folks, all is not woe and misery… nothing a few hundred dollars won’t fix, at least. And, while it’s fun to complain for comedic value – it’s also annoying.

OK yeah, you have to watch this: Fear of Girls, a free film on Google Video about table-top RPG players… hilarious (via MeFi).

Out.

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shooting sharks

An ongiong parody.
Near 10pm Monday evening, sitting in the “computer room” for a change, since Sharaun’s holed up in here working on progress reports for her class or something. She can’t concentrate with music, so I’ve got the iPod on shuffle in the “blues” genre – really been getting off on listening to blues standards lately, maybe it’s the weather. Still need to do the dishes and put some coffee in the pot for the morning… too late already. I guess today’s thing is a hodgepodge of little one-off paragraphs that didn’t fit anywhere else. Oh, and you may notice the larger-than-average post-accompanying pictures of late, just roll with it, it won’t be forever – I’m having fun.

Even though some may say it’s too early to call, I think we may have a frontrunner for media-overdose of 2006: the trapped miner. 2003 it was shark attacks, 2004 was attractive white girls going missing (extra bonus if they were pregnant), hurricanes ruled 2005, and it’s looking like ’06 may shape up to be a cave-in frenzy. If only we could get some attractive, pregnant white woman trapped in a caved-in mine, with rescuers unable to reach her due to a massive hurricane which has picked up sharks from the ocean and is raining them over the West Virginian countryside… CNN’s head would asplode. Really, I just wrote that whole paragraph because I pictured swirling clouds “shooting out” hungry sharks and cracked up at a vision of them hurtling towards earth, gaping razor-mouth first. Hahaha. Shooting sharks.

Do you know that nowhere on all my DirecTV channels is there any instance of Gilligan’s Island? Are you for real? We have 300 some-odd channels, each with 24hrs of programming, and not a single one can show an hour a week of a classic like Gilligan’s Island? What the heck am I paying for if I can’t even watch Gilligan’s Island?

Before I leave, I wanted to share a little thing that happened to me a few weeks ago. I wrote about it then (post 611, this is 621), but binned it for the next God entry instead of pushing it through. Anyway, I basically cut and pasted it out of that work-in-progress God entry here: Friday night I had some beer. I was driving home afterward (buzzed driving is drunk driving), listening to Sufjan’s Seven Swans. The song “The Transfiguration” has always been a favorite or mine, and this particular night I was extra struck by its religious imagery. At this point in the old entry, I quoted the lyrics in full. Rather than do that here, I just wanted to link to it so you can hear for yourself. It’s a great tune (if you like the trademark super-super-super gay Sufjan sound), so don’t let the God-talk scare you off.

OK whatever goodnight.

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all the way to the horizon

Never coming down.
Today on the way home for lunch (baby-budget, remember), I was listening to Menomena’s new three-track (thematic, if not full-blown “concept”) EP/album, Under An Hour (which it is, just barely, at 54min). Of the three tracks, which are each near the 20min mark, I’ve rarely gotten to the final one. So… liking the first two tracks so much, I decided to flip direct to the last track. Turns out, the third track begins with a buzzy droning sound, completely unaccompanied; something like a small plane sounds like from inside the cockpit.

Wait, if you skipped that last paragraph because it started out about music, go back – I’m actually going somewhere with this and needed the music to set it up. Go ahead, I’ll give you a second…

Anyway, with the windows down and that drone droning on in my ears, I started to imagine I was in a plane. Flying over the same roads I was driving, watching myself down there. If you’re having a hard time picturing this, pop in Kubrick’s The Shining DVD and watch the opening sequence as the Torrances make their way up to the lodge, shot from a helicopter tracing their winding path up the wooded road.

Suddenly, being up in the sky and far above the me driving down below, I felt all at once alone and free. I could just keep flying, stay airborne, take it to the mountains or even over the ocean. Stay up in the cold thin air with nothing but the drone of the engines outside. I could look down on little people like me and their purposed motions, heading home for a quick sandwich because they’re about to have a baby and a pound of deli meat is cheaper than a pre-fab sandwich at the cafeteria. But not me. I’m up here in the sky where there’s no turn I can’t take, no direction I can’t point myself in. Aimed into the blue all the way to the horizon.

When I was a kid, in 5th grade or so, I used to daydream about jumping out of my swing at the very top of the arc. I’d spread my arms and fly away, circling above the playground looking down at the upturned heads of my amazed classmates. That, or the one where I could walk on the ceilings, my feet stuck to the top of the walkway coverings – just out of reach of the kids below. Oh, and there was the one where I could walk through walls… that one was mostly used to get into closets other such places where I could spy on girls undressing. So, aside from the pervert one, I guess flying away type escapist fantasies have been with me from a young age. There’s something alluring about looking down on everything, as a supreme being would on his creation. They’re down there, you’re up here – and they can’t even throw a rock and hit you. Money.

Finally, and added early this morning after I’d already auto-published at midnight, some non-abstract writing (and darn good news). Sharaun, who wins so much stuff on the radio that we get W2s from Infinity and ClearChannel, this morning won a 60GB video iPod. She promptly called and told me to get out of bed and tune in for the call-in contest responsible. Oh yeah, and she won some Globetrotter tickets too, which I’m actually pretty pumped about… but the iPod I’ve been dreaming of, and it’s within the baby-budget… free-ninety-free. How she does it, I have no idea.

Goodnight.