Category: general

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

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gettin’ out of town

I dunno... somehow I got from minestrone to this... go figure.
Half-day at work tomorrow, haven’t really told anyone – just gonna sneak out. Hope to be putting road behind us by noon, speeding along the nine-ish hour journey from the kiln-hot weather of Northern California to the will-it-or-won’t-it rain toady clouded uncertainty of Northern Oregon. Already tonight I feel better for getting off my ass and finally beginning to tackle some of the domestic duties that my laziness has been roadblocking. I got the dishes done, and am only typing now as a “pause” between vacuuming and sweeping then mopping the kitchen. Still need to pack up and stow the camping gear, that’s to-be-done, oh and unpack the suitcase from NYC – just shy of a week from returning. The goal is to return to something that’s not an insurmountable disaster but a maintainable tidiness. And I’m only writing now in between tasks, to let the sweat settle.

I’m always late paying my bill to the city, y’know, the one for water, sewer, and trash service. It’s forever one month in arrears. The way I figure it, it’s not my fault. They only accept the most outmoded form of payment: the once viable now laughably analog personal check sent through the stone-age holdover that is the US Postal Service. I can’t be held responsible if I’m expected to collect my mail in a timely manner, open it, comprehend it, and then reply with some scrap of paper that I have to write on with my hand. C’mon folks, gimme something I can log-on to, something I can click through, whatever verb I use to pay this bill I want to it to have an ‘e’ and a hyphen preceding it. For God’s sake I learned to write a check in the mandatory “Family Life” class they made us take in 9th grade, and they were already out of style then. Get with the times, get hip, save yourself the processing costs. You are the sole bill I can’t auto-pay online. So anyway, tonight I paid it… some $200 of back-owed fees. It’s a wonder the nice garbage men still collect at our curb and we get fresh water when we turn the tap.

New music, let’s see… what am I listening to? As I mentioned yesterday, this Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! album is great. Funny thing is, I checked their webpage – and their most recent show was with a band called Dirty on Purpose, which I immediately recognized as a name I’d seen before. Turns out Ben’s bro’s band, the also-Brooklyn-based Autodrone, has played with Dirty on Purpose several times in the past. While doing this research, I learned that Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! played a show in NYC this past Monday – the very day I was in NYC bumming around with nothing to do. That Knitting Factory must be a popular place, I see Autodrone and Dirty On Purpose have also played together there before, and apparently the ‘drone were set to play there this weekend before the avocado incident. Hindsight is 20-20 y’all. Anyway, back to the Clap (chuckle) – you have to, must, just gotta check out this track (Flash required). In other tunes, I also grabbed the couple new tracks from the post-Unicorns outfit, the Islands, since PF tipped me off. Not bad.

Hey. I just realized I never ate dinner. I mean, I had several handfuls of Wheat Thins around 6pm, but… that’s not really dinner. Man, I love some Wheat Thins. But now I’m sitting here and it’s 11:30 and on TV Barney is talking about mozzarella pizza in Mayberry… and I’m hungry, I want some food. The smart man would ignore this and go to bed – sleep is a sure-fire cure for hunger. But me, I’m rummaging through the pantry… considering a can of Minestrone soup… or maybe some Rice-A-Roni. I think I’ve settled on the Minestrone, Sharaun’s reminding me, “It’s eleven-thirty at night baby,” yeah… I know. I’m hungry.

Independence Day holiday in the USA this weekend, don’t expect posts Monday or Tuesday, if the come they will be unexpected.

Goodnight.

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a place to sleep

Good for the skin.
Man… just woke up from a hardcore nap, it’s about 9:30pm. Fell asleep on the couch watching TV, that damn flickerbox robbed me of another evening of productivity. I had big plans: unpack from New York, because my suitcase is still sitting on the bedroom floor; repack the camping equipment from this weekend, as it’s still piled in the garage from when I aired it out after returning; start picking up around the house, as it’s still littered with debris from the bridal shower and party Sharaun had here more than a week ago; I would’ve even settled for just doing the dishes from this evening’s meal. But man, I’m so out of practice with the regular chores that I’m really letting them slip. I feel like I’m all out of continuity or something. I set my alarm for an hour early on Monday, thinking I’d get up early and do some tidying before work – but of course I snoozed that entire thing away. Anyday now, I’m ready to get back into my routine…

When I was in the second grade, our teacher had a small squarish picture-book dealing with “hobby sports.” It had full-page action shots of people doing different things, with the title of the activity at the bottom of the page. There were pages for skiing, skydiving, surfing, boating, etc. I can remember looking at the book and flipping the pages. One of the pages seemed a little thick, too thick to be one page. Upon closer inspection I discovered that it really wasn’t a single page, but two pages that were somehow stuck together. Being curious, I carefully tried to pry apart the stuck pages. Turns out the were stuck together purposely, by our teacher, because one of the now hidden pictures portrayed the sport of “skin diving.” With the pages torn apart, I could make out the nude forms of a male and female diver. (Is it proper to have my pluralized “forms” be mated with the singular “diver” in that sentence?) At this point, I either began showing this to other kids, or Mrs. Kline spotted me – either way I was found out. I can remember her lecturing me for “ruining” her book. I think that’s kind of unfair. You glue two pages of a book together and expect inquisitive second-graders not to pry them apart in curiosity. How about cutting out the offending page, or not using the book at all – it was probably 15 pages max anyway.

Got a call from my little bro over the weekend. He’s busy making all the preparations for his tour in Iraq come December. His unit finally got their orders the other day, and they will be stationed at Camp Liberty (Camp Al-Tahreer in Arabic, and also formerly known as Camp Victory). Camp Victory is “… one of the largest US overseas posts built since the Vietnam War, [and] … lies northeast of Baghdad International Airport…” It is planned to be able to accommodate 14,000 troops at capacity. For a long time, my brother telling me he was going to Iraq was pretty much just that – nothing too scary. But hearing him tell me where he’d been ordered, and how he’s making preparations to send his wife home to her folks while he’s away made me really think about it. I don’t know, I don’t have a lot of fear for his wellbeing, I feel like he can handle himself and that the odds are with him… but all the same I wish he wasn’t going. I can’t imagine how it’d feel on the eve of leaving all the things I know and love for a year. Bugs me.

As much as I’ve been looking forward to our upcoming high school reunion next month, I’ve been dreading it nearly as much because tickets to FL are running between $500 and $600 per-person right now. Considering we’re only going to be there for a couple days since Sharaun’s scheduling around work, it was just hard for me to justify dropping more than a grand on the trip. So today, out of desperation, I started reviewing my various airline miles. Turns out, that we could fly for about $240 if we’d be willing to each fly a different airline. I called Sharaun, presented the ~$800 savings scenario to her, and she was down. So, I’m on United and she’s on Continental – but at least I was able to score pretty similar flight times so we’re not too disparate. Yeah, it sucks – but we already shelled out a hundred or so just for the reunion festivities… I am really looking forward to it, despite my lamentation. More importantly, it’s another trip to the airport and some more quality time on an airplane!

Need to make reservations for my trip to Shanghai, apparently I’m needed the 1st week of August. Also wouldn’t hurt to book travel for the (now two-week) September Taiwan trip. I’ve never been to Shanghai, so I’m looking forward to it – since I’ll know some folks in town who can show me around. Taiwan is Taiwan, we don’t need to go into that again until the time comes. I brought some work home tonight, y’know, to work on; never got to it.

Oh, and Wes is right about McD’s, I had already forgotten the whole McRib incident… a textbook example of repression. Goodnight.

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where’s paris?

Greetings from early America.
The Big Apple; I knew I’d arrived when it cost me $45 and took an entire episode of Lost to get from JFK to Manhattan. Getting in under cover of dark last night, I got a decent view of Manhattan skyline while crossing the bridge – but I’m so unfamiliar with the layout of this city that I didn’t know where to look for anything. The hotel, like many hotels it seems, is insanely posh on the outside – the lobby lush with giltwork and marble, brass fixtures and fountains, etc. But the insides are likely the same insides that were built on day-one – chinked and dirty baseboards, funny-smelling behemoths of air conditioning units, and worst of all no in-room broadband aside from the citywide pay-as-you-go access I can pickup in the room (thankfully). In this day and age I don’t understand how a hotel that caters to a business crowd gets away without having high-speed access, it seems unthinkable… Maybe I’m spoiled by the Sherwood, the measuring stick to which I hold all hotels to.

Getting up at 6am here is hard for my I-know-it’s-really-3am sleeping habits, and I found myself snoozing the alarm for forty some-odd minutes, all the while telling myself I’d padded the wake-up time anyway. One interesting thing about this trip – I probably have less of an idea what I’m actually going to be doing here than any other trip I’ve been on in recent times. I mean, I know I’m presenting at some point – but I just received the material last night; and I know I’m standing on the conference floor flogging product. It’s the logistics of it all that’s got me wondering. I don’t know when the thing starts (I did read that 8am today is when we can 1st access the conference area to setup), what the running times are, when I’m presenting, etc. Heck, they didn’t even have my reservation in the system when I arrived last night – I’m lucky I even got a room here. But… in the end, things worked out. I flopped into this ratty old office chair around 11pm last night and promptly ordered a sammich from room service while firing up the wireless radio in search of a signal. Watched a couple more downloaded episodes of Lost (yes, I am hopelessly addicted), and called it a night.

Oh, and I was totally pumped to learn that the San Francisco to JFK United flights have AC outlets in all their seats, even economy. I plugged in mid-flight and was able to run the laptop the entire time (of course, continuing to tear through season one of that damn addictive show). Seeing how impressed I was by the power, the attendant told me that all their planes had also been wired for wireless access – and we’re simply awaiting the FAA’s nod of approval to “flip the switch” and turn it on. How cool is that? I really don’t think it will be long before the internet is as ubiquitous as radio is today, and you’re able to pick up a signal just about anywhere and get online. My kids will laugh when I tell them that we used to have to plug our computers into the wall to get online – how antiquated – like having to get up and “flip” a record or tape to listen to “Side B.”

It’s 8am here now, which is when I wanted to be walking downstairs. I wanted to give myself as much time as possible to set up, in case the show happens to start at 10am or something. I think, I think I remember hearing somewhere along the lines that this thing doesn’t officially “kick off” until tomorrow – and operating under that very sketchy info I opted not to shave this morning, figuring it for a preparation day only. I truly hope this is so. I would like nothing more than to be able to head downstairs now, be setup and configured in a couple hours, and then have the rest of the day to tour the city. Otherwise, I’ll be headed back up to the room for a shave and change of clothes before being thrown into the fire.

And well, now it’s time to head out. Glad I could manage an entry today, the outlook was grim around 1am last night when I was too tired to write. See ya.

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discovery

Today was the first day I could afford to slack.
I’m back. If only I could offload this NYC trip next week, I’d be perfectly happy. The laundry has overflowed the hamper in the closet, and is spilled out in piles on the floor. I have to step over mounds of it to get to my clean clothes on hangers. It’s been that way since the three weeks in Taiwan, we’ve just never caught up from that, and combined with my other travel… things around the house are pretty much stagnating. Going away for another week will only perpetuate my nagging “barely keeping up” feeling. I need some time to be where I normally am and catch up on my normal routine. Oh, and I’m’a get it… I’m’a definitely get it after this New York trip… when travel should dry up for a good couple months.

Filmmakers, advertisers, and marketers, as part of your target demographic – I have to tell you something that may shock you: The seemingly always-funny combination of elderly people and hip-hop music/culture is not funny anymore. It’s just not funny anymore. Yeah sure, I can remember the day when I once got a chuckle from that old lady spitting classic Sugar Hill in that one movie teaser. But guys, that was a looong time ago. Geriatric Ebonics is past it’s prime, much like the only-for-white-people-now 1980s “-izzle” speak that Snoop brought back into vogue – it’s just over. As a marketing device that made middle-aged white people feel relevant, it was a screaming success… but nothing can last forever. Even totally awesome marketing campaigns eventually come to an end. R.I.P. Bud Bowl, Coors Twins, and yes… rappin’ granny. Your time has, mercifully, come to an end.

Usually, I hate to write about TV… mostly because I hate to think that a television show could be an important enough part of my life to were I’d spend time writing about it. But, I’m gonna break my unwritten writing rule and write about TV. Recently, one of the networks or cable channels starting replaying the series “Lost” from the beginning. Sharaun and I had heard quite a bit about the show previously, so we decided to sic a TiVo season pass on it. The other night, we finally got around to starting it – and I was immediately rapt. This show was seemingly written with me in mind. It’s got people stranded on a desert island, using their wits and brawn to survive, which by itself is enough reason for me to tune in. But on top of the island thing, it’s got secret codes and stuff. The other night, Pat was saying that all it needed to be stolen from my brain was a Henry’s Bar on the island. Anyway, I watched three episodes last night, and kicked off the downloads for episodes 4-12 when I got home from work tonight. The plan was to watch them as they air over the summer, but having them at my fingertips on the intarweb is just too irresistible to pass up. OK… sorry.

I leave you with a tale of blogging in the news again, goodnight.

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a hardcore caveman

It's good to be back.
When we got on the shuttle that took us from the Denver airport to the hotel, they gave us a couple pieces of advice: 1. Make sure you drink more water than normal, because you get dehydrated easier at the city’s elevation; and 2. Any alcohol you consume here has double the impact it would in your usual lowly-elevated cities. I dunno, but #2 kinda sounded like a science experiment waiting to happen to me. And, after last night, I can say with confidence that, for me at least, it ain’t true. I kept track of my intake last night so that I could double it the next day and see what I “Denver-drank.” Turns out, if the doubling rule holds true, I Denver-drank fourteen beers and four shots. If I had drank that in the span of last night’s outing I’d’ve been supremely blasted… and I was only pretty plowed (yeah, there’s a difference).

Still, the cigarettes did the most damage. When someone saw me with one last night and cast an inquisitive glance, I nodded toward my smoking hand and, over the thumping bass, said, “Only when I drink.” “How often do you drink?,” quipped back my friend. “Only when I smoke,” I replied. I’ve kind of figured I’ll never really learn with that one… I’m sure there was one caveman who insisted on sticking his hand in the fire over and over just to see if there was one time it wouldn’t burn him; I’m that caveman. I guess I could have worse alcohol-induced vices, like hookers or barfights or seizures. Well OK, maybe seizures are a stretch, but you know what I’m saying. I’m merely flirting with cancer, at least I’m not running the risk of flopping around and swallowing my tongue. What the heck? Ahhh… In bed by 3am, up by 5am to catch my flight… a hardcore caveman.

It was a good way to end the conference, cast off the pressures of the preceding week, and let loose a bit. We ended up at the Coyote Ugly bar, the likes of which I’d never been to before. The bartenders are all attractive young girls who split their time between serving up the firewater and dancing provocatively on the bar for the audience of ogling men. The place is kind of a laugh really, watching a whole crowd of men under the complete spell of two or three scantily-clad women dancing on the bar… holding out fistfuls of bills for more drinks, whistling and catcalling, and snapping pictures. Someone said to me while we were there, “This place is like the halfway house between stripping and bartending, ” and that’s about as accurate a description as you can give it. But, I had a good time. Those girls own their 99% male audience, and they know it. I was thinking what a feeling of power that must be, and how if I was a hot chick with little inhibition I might like to strut around on a bar and sling drinks to make my way through college or something. Anyway, the beer was cold, the music was loud, and I’d never done body shots before – so all in all it was an enjoyable experience.

I don’t understand what the hang up is about driving with the windows down and the air conditioning on. Why is this so bad? I love having the windows down when I drive, but sometimes it’s a little too warm for my taste if the sun is beaming directly on me, so I turn on the air. This seems to confound some people. I think the idea is that I’m somehow “wasting” air conditioning. As if filling the shut-up car with it is any less “wasteful.” It’s not like there’s a true thermostat in my truck and the air will only come on to maintain a set temperature. When I use the air with the windows up, I just turn it on and leave it on to maintain a temperature that I like. How’s that any different than doing the same thing with the windows down? I like the fresh air, and the cold breeze from the air vents… is that so hard to understand? A waste of gas, you say? Bah, if the windows were up I’d surely have it on anyway. Get off your high horse and let me enjoy my air conditioning however wastefully I choose. I also mix regular trash with recyclables and pour motor oil down the stormdrain, so take that… hippy.

My entry yesterday generated three comments, that’s not bad really. Well, of course I got 753 online poker and natural viagra comments that got trapped by the spam filter. But three legit comments is a big deal for me. I’m not some superstar blogger who gets fifty comments on his every post, I’m just some writin’ dude who has six friends who know his web address.

No, I don’t really pour motor oil down the stormdrain. Catch ya later.

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threat level blue

Get it?
I think they heard my sigh of relief back in California this morning. It’s done. The presentation I spent weeks slaving over, sweating and raking fingers through my hair over, is, itself, over. And people, let me tell you that I feel great. My cramming paid off, my practice showed, and I came away from both sessions feeling great. And despite my good intentions last night, the beers I couldn’t seem to avoid didn’t seem to bother me at all. I am so glad it’s over – I’ve never been as wrung out over just a simple presentation… and I’ve done more than my share in the past. It’s just that I had precious little time to prepare, and knew it would effect my performance if I didn’t invest the proper amount. Luckily, I pulled it off. And now, with a great sense of relief – I’m done writing about it. In fact, I’m trying to be done with my writing-about-work streak… this should be it for a while. I want to get back to the regular stuff, the mundane stuff. Like…

What is it about dress slacks that makes them seemingly more prone to ass-smell? I mean, I’ll accept it as a given that any pair of pants, regardless of dressiness, will eventually inherit some ass-smell with repeated wearings. It’s a fact, something that is in that close a proximity to ass for an extended amount of time will of course begin to smell like ass. But, with dresspants, at least for me, the time it takes for the ass-smell to migrate from in-my-ass to in-the-fabric-of-my-pants is really reduced over “normal” type pants. Like this morning, I got dressed in my freshly laundered khaki slacks and headed down to my classroom to present bright and early at 8am. I presented until around 10:45pm, and then headed out to help a friend setup some equipment. As I was lifting heavy boxes and stuff, I got a whiff of something that smelled like ass. But, how could this be? I’ve only had the pants on for a mere four hours! How in the world can the ass smell be here already? But, it was. The ass smell was definitely there. I dunno, it must be something with the fabric. Or my ass. Or something. I really hope other people (dudes, I’m suspecting) experience pants-ass-smell, and that it’s not unique to me. I didn’t really think about that before writing this…

Now I’m sitting in my mile + 12 stories high hotel room, getting ready to take a nap.

Awesome.

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rock bottom

Treed.
Friday. Friday. Friday.

Too late. No time. I’m screwed.

The presentation I slaved over into the wee hours last night went off without a hitch, and even garnered positive feedback. My laptop is back with a shiny new install of WinXP, and is running like gangbusters (whatever that means). You’d think I’d be happy, relieved, maybe even a bit relaxed. Shit no I’m not. I am literally feeling crushed tonight. I’m freaking out. I did my first dry-run of my big conference presentation tonight, me and the stopwatch on my cellphone, in front of the mirror – an open notebook to jot down thoughts as I ran through my material in “presenter mode” for the first time. Oh, it went OK for the stuff I knew it’d go OK for; and it bit for the stuff I was a little unsure about. The worst part? The damn thing only took me ~30min to get through. That’s a disaster folks, a disaster. I am will be up in front of these people for 70min, and expected to talk for at least 60 of those. I have a problem, and the only way to solve it is to pad my material and get a better grip on what I’m talking about. But right now I just can’t help but see a persistent vision of sand running out of an hourglass in my head… time’s a wastin’. I have tomorrow, and the weekend, and perhaps some of Monday… and then it’s go-time. I’m frustrated, I’m worried, I’m nervous, and to be honest I just want to run away and hide until it’s over.

And I just don’t want to work right now. I want my night back. I want to sit here and watch TV with my wife, and I’m going to. I don’t care. I mean, I care more than anything right now – but I just don’t care. Sometimes we can get to laughing about something and I almost forget my misery. Whatever, I’m tired of waking and working being synonymous. I’m letting the little things slide, but they are making me big unhappy. I hate that I’ve forgot to take out the trash the past three Thursdays, and have had to jump out of bed at the sound of the trucks on Friday morning to try and get it to the curb in time. I hate that I’ve started letting the lawn get longer before I mow it, and that the night’s dinner dishes now linger in the sink until just before the next night’s meal. The little chores I took pride in not three weeks ago are all screwed up. Whatever… I’ll make it up this weekend, I’ll do something, I’ll do whatever. I’ll make something happen. I don’t even want to write about it…

Good night.