fine whine

It would seem that I have once again emerged as the number one result for ‘whine’ on google.

It’s pretty bad that I have nothing else to write. Today has not been an uneventful day: far from it, actually. Early this morning whilst I was working online and playing with a model railroad layout planning CAD program I began to notice some commotion outside in the dark night, when lo and behold everything went dark for but a second. My computer rebooted and I thought something about putting the UPS out in the garage to some serious use other than the fine door-stoppery with which I have apparently tasked it so far.

After the ten minutes it takes Windows to start (yes, for the time being I’m back in Windows, as I will explain) I couldn’t get my modem to reconnect. It just didn’t work, muttering some error message about finding no dial tone. Not so, said I, the dial tone’s fine, and plugged in a phone to prove it.

At which point the outside world exploded. The loudest thunderclap and the brightest lightning strike struck, apparently right outside my window. At the time it really threw me, but thereafter it was pretty impressive, in retrospect.

It was also irrelevant to the story, as the power surge or electrical spike that apparently has hobbled my modem came several minutes before the big one. Damn, said I, it wasn’t even a big one that blew it up.

So my external modem’s dead. That pretty much does it for me and the great Linux experiment, as my other modems barely work under windows and are not among the select group of newfangled modems supported well under Linux. So it goes.

This all transpired within an hour or two after midnight. The day was just beginning.

Later this morning Jessica found out that her grandma had passed away, and periodic phone calls throughout the day confirmed the funeral and her parents’ plan to swing by on their way to NC to take her with them. I stayed home, but felt bad about it.

Her parents’ impeding arrival meant that we needed to clean, and to try to get the house looking like, well, a house inside instead of just a collection of boxes and junk. I reassembled the table, pronounced it finished and moved it and its chairs into the dining room. I’ll say it looks a lot better than the card table did.col

I keep saying that I’ll go around and take pictures before the place gets all dirtied up, but I stay so busy with cleaning, eating, sleeping, video gaming, lawn mowing that I just can’t get in wandering around the house with a camera for the what, five minutes such a thing would take?

That was a horrible sentence.

Jessica’s parents are arriving tonight to whisk her away tomorrow to North Carolina. I’m going to be staying here so that I can go to work! Woo hoo.

So we have this fancy new dishsoap, see, and it seems to have a color just a bit greener than usual. Well, at least that’s how it looked to me. I was thinking about it (whoa, so vivid) and began to wonder what it would look like under a black light.

Then the image came to me of people doing dishes at a rave, or something like that. I think it would look pretty cool to have glowing soap, although all the sweaty teenagers hopped up on X and life and bopping around to hard house beats might make scrubbing difficult.

Just a thought.

I really shouldn’t complain about staying up too late at nights. It’s not like I don’t do it to myself, what with movies, web browsing and instant messaging to keep me awake.

If you go by the date atop this, yesterday I talked about being all caught up. If you go by the date I’m actually typing this, you may find a discrepancy and moreover discover that I am again catching myself up.

To do so I am staying awake past bedtime, but I’d probably be up anyway. Back when we lived in the apartment, though, there was often a good half hour between when Jessica would go to bed and then when would I (sorry about the backwards grammar, it just sounded cool). This was when I was to be getting to work at 7am and she at 8 or 9. Nowadays I need to get to work at 8:30 and Jessica’s alarm goes off at 5:30am. Big switch. Back then, though, we were pretty much on the same bedtime schedule, except for the nights I’d stay awake, toiling away on this and other projects.

Now I just stay awake, playing games or watching movies. Except today, when I happened to bump into good college buddy Gonzojag, with whom I haven’t had any contact since I graduated some two years back.

My fault, really. I’m a real bastard about keeping up with people. This you may already know.

So anyway, we had a nice chat (he was at work, over in Tokyo) and reminisced and whatnot. At one point we were talking about my graduation ceremony (he’d graduated the year before, taking a mere four years to get a degree instead of my five) and I started to think about why graduations are sad and people cry. Sure, it’ sthe end of things, but it’s not like the day crept up or anything.

No, the reason I think that graduation was sad was that here I was, sitting in a field with a bunch of my friends, and all we could do was face forward and listen to a bunch of people talk. In black robes, in partly sunny conditions.

Why didn’t we bust out some frisbees and footballs? Our last hours together, and we sat around? What’s up with that?

So maybe that’s why I stole my chair. I still have it, the chair in which I graduated (and listened to Kofi Annan speak, and so on and so forth), but that’s small consolation for missed opportunities.

I caught myself up today on all of the drafts upon which I had been sitting, metaphorically (or is it metaphysically?) speaking. Pretty much all of them were half-formed ideas at best, and I had to scrap a couple altogether. Maybe I’ll dredge them up someday in the future, on a day when I have nothing about which to write, on a day like today.

Or not.

I gave blood today. It only took me four and a half minutes to pump out the ol’ pint this time around. I’m pretty sure that’s a personal best.

Nobody else within four cubicles of me donated today. I don’t know if they were too busy or afraid of needles or had paid for sex since 1977, but it disheartens me to be the only one running around with the goofy purple bandage on my elbow.

Or maybe I’m confusing “dishearten” with “embarrass”–except that I wasn’t embarrassed. That said, I chose not to wear the Ziggy “I gave blood today” sticker.

There are times I have a tendency to get a little silly at work. My co-workers by now understand my unique sense of humor and no longer give me too strange of looks when I try to crack wise or be witty. Instead they (fake a ) laugh and we all emjoy a brief reprieve from our otherwise drudgerous days.

Today I latched onto making proclamations. We bandy about a bunch of terms without having really set the words in stone, and this occasionally leads to confusion, or at least rampant inconsistency. On garments we ask for a “hangtag”, a piece of card stock or paper or something similar with marketing information on it. We also request “hang tags”. Typos add to the endless variations of “hangtag” around the office. So today, with my colleagues’ agreement, I set it in stone with a hand-scrawled sign in my cubicle:

“Henceforth, ‘Hangtag’ shall be one word.”

Naturally they mocked me for using such an archaic word as “henceforth”. Realizing my error, I quickly amended my sign with another one:

“Henceforth, ‘Going Forward’ shall replace ‘Henceforth’.”

This too got a laugh, and we went back to work. The phrase bounced around in my head, a bit, and I have to admit that it has a neat rhythm to it. I started to imagine it being a real proclamation, and a new world unfolded in my head.

I thought of a medieval king laying down the law, trying to modernize his kingdom in words and other stuff. He’d be surrounded by his Knights, sitting behind signs with “sir” scrawled out and “VP” scrawled over their names. They’d be wearing ties over their coats of armor, as well, except that such a thing would be too ridiculous. At one point the King would call in their newly-dubbed Knowledge Worker, Merlin, and hijinks would ensue as a people so unfamiliar with modern English let alone modern business-speak would butcher both languages.

The idea had potential, but I had to get some work done and it was relegated to some chicken scratchings on a post-it note.

I was thinking about coins today. Walking to Meijer I stumbled across one that has no markings save for a picture on each side. There is nothing to indicate denomination or value, nor really to indicate if it is money at all. It’s a near-blank. Even Chuck-E-Cheese puts their name on their tokens, but this thing has no indication of place of origin, either–just a couple pictures.

It got me thinking about money systems and coins. Are all of the markings really necessary? I tried to create a system of coinage that didn’t need any markings at all, yet was still obvious as to value. Without identifying marks a coin would need some sort of unique shape or sizing to provide a standard for comparative value, and I didn’t really want to mess with sizes. That’s how we got into the whole penny is bigger than a dime but smaller than a nickel debacle still wreaking havoc in the American economy, after all.

No, in my system I thought of using points or vertices. Geometric shapes such as triangles, squares, pentagons and so forth were pretty obvious but not so useful, as what sort of system would start with three (or rather would want to divorce number of sides from value so readily)? I then imagined a bunch of mostly-round coins with a varying number of bulges to indicate value. An egg-shaped one would be worth one. An ellipse, two, and so on and so forth.

There are two problems with simplifying coins, though. First, the economics of minting money out of commonly available materials means that either the money could be melted down for its raw ore worth more or that anybody with access to cheap materials and simple machinery could make their own coinage. I didn’t have a long enough walk home to spend too much time pondering such issues as have plagued the U.S. Mint for centuries. The second problem with my money would be that they’d be nearly useless in conventional vending machines. With only half a block to mull this over, I realized that vending machines were created to work with the coins, not the other way around, and with my system the same would happen. Problem solved.

Today was a project day for the plants out in front of our house. We’d tilled up the dirt some time ago, planted various green things (including some holly and, er, other stuff) and we’ve grown quite a collection of weeds and miniature maple trees. Pulling every little weed is quite a tedious task, so we knuckled down and got some peat humus to take care of the problem. We’re not supposed to use mulch near the house because it attracts bugs, and that’s fine with me. Peat humus does not smell, unlike the mulch I’ve had the bad fortune to encounter.

So we were off to the local Lowe’s to buy some bags of the stuff. It comes in forty pound bags, and Jessica threw nine of them onto our cart this morning.

It covered just about half of our dirt. So we needed to make a second trip. This time around I brought my garden gloves, and was much cleaner afterward as a result of that pretty intelligent move. We bought ten bags which made for quite a bit of weight in the trunk of the car. It was obvious that the car was not meant to handle so much weight not in the seats, and the back was sagging quite a bit (well, a couple inches, but to me it was a lot).

I didn’t realize how much it sunk the whole car until I got back into it later (with the stuff still in the trunk) and noticed, out loud, “I’m feeling low.”

Almost immediately, I launched into “I got the blues. The four hundred pounds of peat humus blues.”

Jessica laughed, at least. I thought it was hilarious. You probably had to be there.

Let’s talk about the film Looney tunes: back in action. It’s not a very good movie at all. I never would have expected to see Steve Martin upstaged by Brendan Fraser, but that’s what happens here. In fact Jenna Elfman (TV’s Dharma) shows more range and versatility than the comedy veteran, who is reduced to some sort of evil nerd role with coke-bottle glasses, oily hair and pants that are too short. Alas, a stupid costume does not a character make, nor does the sort-of accent he half-assedly attempts help things.

Fortunately, he’s not on screen much.

Unfortunately, Brendan Fraser, Jenna Elfman, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck are. Daffy’s funny in small doses, but any scene lasting longer than, oh, twelve seconds, with him in it starts to grate. I vaguely recall him being somewhat abrasive in the original cartoons, but this was ridiculous (but not in a good way).

Tim Dalton is perfectly adequate as Brendan Fraser’s spy-movie-actor father. That said, it’s more interesting to look at the posters in his house than to watch him on screen to see actual humor. There and everywhere else the throwaway gags are better. I laughed hardest when Wile E. Coyote answered the telephone with a sign saying “HELLO?” which was just brilliant.

There’s a scene about halfway through showing “Area 52″ which is apparently where old movie monsters (and other curiousities) go to be stuck in jars. At one point Kevin MacCarthy staggers by clutching a pod and shouting “You’re next!” for a quick gag. The flying brain from Fiend without a face drops by, just after the original gorilla suit/diving helmet mashup Robot monster’s monster. Elsewhere Dr. Who’s Daleks pop up, which I find ironic, in that evidently their creator has decided to not allow them to be in the new remake project, yet he apparently green-lighted them to be in this bomb.

Maybe he realized that their memory wouldn’t be much more tarnished because nobody in their right mind wants to remember this movie, let alone to have watched it.

Ever feel like a peg-legged pirate who has been knee-capped in the one good knee? I do.

You know, without a leg to stand on? Or as I would say, rather, without a leg on which to stand, in my stilted but more (pedantically) correct way. Me hearties.

Silliness aside, I’d like to tell you a story. Today I was at work later than usual. I had a couple errands to run and I also wanted to drop by the local model railroading store. Errands run, nobs hobbed, breezes shot and whatnot and I ended up getting home pretty late. I didn’t eat dinner right away. Or for a while thereafter.

I got to be quite hungry before I did anything about it, and by that time it was dark. I didn’t turn on the lights in the kitchen. I grabbed a quarter of the freshly baked pizza my wife had made hours before, and scarfed it down without much second thought. It was pretty good. The crust was by Pillsbury, the cheese from Kroger and the sauce by my mother-in-law.

Oops. I don’t like her sauce. It has little chunks of peppers and other unsavory bits of things in it, and I ate it too quickly to even notice. I guess that’s what I get for not chewing.

I had the lights on for the second piece, and scraped the sauce off. Still tasted good, and I was able to eat it without cringing. I realize that pickiness about food is all a mental thing, but I can’t control my mind any better than anyone else. Just don’t tell Jessica.