Today I downloaded two MP3s that said they were Al Green.
They weren’t.
They were Bill Withers. If they’d been from the same host I would have understood, but they were from two different hosts, which means that quite possibly two different people think two different Bill Withers tunes are actually the Reverend Al Green.
*sigh*
Behold! Today marks my two-year part-time anniversary! AND MY HOUSE STILL ISN’T VERY CLEAN.
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Now that things seem settled, it’s time to make the site look better.
To that end, I’ve got a little dev area set up and I’m working on a new look. I took a layout from one of those free stylesheet sites (movablestyle.com) and am tweaking it. Right now it’s boxy, dark, and fugly. Maybe I’ll work on it more tomorrow.
Since I was online at Ticketmaster buying a ticket for Joe so he can see Gov’t Mule with us this Thursday night, I went ahead and picked up Joe Jackson/Todd Rundgren tickets.
So YES, we’re going to Chicago in May! SWEET! Hopefully I’ll find some money by then and will be able to get some new ink.
I hate Ticketmaster! Fees, surcharges, taxes: two $40 tickets end up costing $106.95. That’s twenty-seven dollars worth of “convenience,” “handling,” and “processing.”
Rat finks.
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Happy Valentine’s Day. Guess what I’m doing today. I’m going to the gynecologist for a follow-up exam. IS THERE NO SENSE IN THIS WORLD?!? Where is my dinner and goddamned dancing?! Or at least a new tattoo?!?
OMG I’m in love with Todd Rundgren’s wife, OF ALL PEOPLE. Her blog is fucking wonderful. She’s a riot. She’s a soft touch. She’s, like, inspiring and shit!
Honestly, I have understood quite clearly for years that Todd is Godd – but I didn’t know shit about his personal life. Didn’t even know if he was married or had kids or what. (I just buy the albums, ma’am.) I didn’t even know that Liv Tyler though he was her dad until she was like 13, until yesterday when I read it on an album review.
So how’d I find Todd’s wife’s adorable blog? Well, it’s like this. I was innocently trolling over at forum.trconnection.com to see what there was to see (there are ways to buy tickets before they’re fully on sale, and I intend to learn them). At some point I clicked a link that took me to a page where I clicked a link and somehow I ended up at http://www.michelerundgren.com.
And, while looking at a stacked blonde upside down in a chair, I thought, “Holy shit, Todd, you’re married to a woman half your fucking age! Eewh! Gross!”
But then I looked at her still photos and discovered she’s of a Proper Decade, and I decided I approved after all. Whatever.
But then I started reading her blog.
She’s fucking fantastic! She’s humble, smart, funny, busy, and cleans her own toilets. She’s a grandma and she’s in a band! She loves her children, and her FOUR DOGS bring dead things into their house!!! Best of all, she never refers to her husband by his name, but always with some descriptive personality, like ‘Alan Greenspan’ (when talking about money) or ‘Liberace’ (when trying to get him to take her on tour) so that her sentences read “…blah blah blah MY HUSBAND, ALAN GREENSPAN, blah blah blah” and it’s just funny as SHIT. (I think I might adopt it myself, except I’d always end up referring to Brett as “that sidekick guy from Braveheart,” which might possibly cease to be funny… after about TEN YEARS.)
Talking about trying to take their youngest out to a movie, she says, “We try to regain our cool status by reminding him that Team America is NC-17 and that he can’t see it without us. Even after we tell him that there is naked puppet sex in it, he still doesn’t want to hang with us… The little bastard! Oh, I forgot, we got married so he’s not a bastard anymore.”
Hah!
She’s also totally zoned in on the idea that women make or break men. A loving woman helps create and nurture a loving man. A good woman raises good sons. I dig that. While she doesn’t seem to go as far as I do and say that bad women are what fucked up half of today’s men, I’m cool with that because very few do.
AND she’s from Oregon! How cool is that?!
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I.C.K. is yum!
OMFG, it’s finally back up and running and HAS BEEN FOR 24 HOURS NOW: it’s Iowa Chicks Knitting on its new server, hosting paid for with $5 and $10 donations from here and there. Sweet like Sunday mornin’! If you’re a member, getcher cute little ass over there and post!
I’ve turned off trackback for this entire domain.
I was so happy last week to feel like I’d finally conquered the comment spam problem – or at least get it sufficiently under control that I wasn’t daily considering turning off comments altogether, and then today I login to MT to find I’ve got myself a little nest of trackback pings. I used MT-Blacklist to delete them, but STILL.
It seems that somewhen on or near February 5th (which was my dad’s birthday, incidentally) some asshat learned how to use trackback pings to savage web servers. Trackback link spam is, apparently, less like comment spamming and lot more like a DOS attack, but the results still up spammers’ numbers in engine rankings.
Why do they do it? Well, you can read this interview with a link spammer to get an idea. How does it affect webmasters and webmistresses everywhere? Read this heartfelt post called No one can have nice things! that I thought sums it up quite coherently.
To fix it, turn of trackback. This article, Trackback Spam Attack, tells how.
Or, less drastically, you can use .htaccess – instructions available here and/or here.
This ad makes it sound like an iPod is a hideous portable music solution, but you *never* own the tracks you get through Napster – their licensing is even more hideously restrictive than the solution Apple’s iTunes store came up with.
As long as you pay the monthly fee, sure sure you can carry around all the music you want. But the day you cancel, well… Napster said it themselves in their own small print: “It is necessary to maintain a Napster subscription in order to continue access to songs downloaded through the Napster service.” (Emphasis mine.)
Don’t believe this marketing crap, folks. Do the research. And don’t forget to go buy yourself a delicious little iPod.
Monday I felt great but found I had a wee cough. Nothing serious. I thought it was the result of bar over-exposure Friday night.
It wasn’t.
Monday night my chest got tight. By nine thirty it hurt; by eleven I was seriously sick. By four in the morning I Was In Hell. My entire chest, from collarbones to hipbones, was ON FIRE. And it HURT.
Then the cough arrived. The kind of cough that comes from your ankes and hurts like you’re being vivisected with a million tiny little ultrasharp scalpels from the inside. The kind of cough you dread, the kind of cough that makes you stop doing anything and everything else simply so you can brace yourself for the onslaught. The kind of cough that makes your skull hurt and the brains inside feel like they’re exploding.
Monday night was a horrible night.
Tuesday morning I called Buzz at 7:30 and left the most ridiculous message; something along the lines of: “Dude, I am SO FUCKING SICK! {cough, cough} I won’t be in today, like, {cough, cough} at ALL.”
I remember yelling “Shut up!” at the dogs at one point, then trailing off into senselessness before groaning, “Okay, bye then,” and pressing the End button on my cell phone. I would have felt stupid for leaving such an absurd message if I hadn’t been So. Fucking. Sick.
I put myself to bed. I slept probably 18 hours that first day. I ate nothing but water, a package of Top Ramen, and an ear of corn on the cob.
The next day, Wednesday, I called Buzz around noon. “Hi, it’s Michelle. I’m calling in sick,” I rasped.
He chuckled. “I figured, since you weren’t here.”
“Yeah, well. Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow! I think I’m feeling better.”
“Oh, uh-huh,” he laughed.
I was awake maybe a total of ten hours that day, in small intervals. The rest of the time I was passed out, sleeping the sleep of the truly wretchedly ill.
Wednesday Brett had come down with it, but not nearly as bad. He had the cough, and the discomfort, but he at least could still move around. He worked half the day, then watched TV through the afternoon. I made occasional pilgrimages to the kitchen for water and he, ever the tender and gentle lover, started calling me Snot. As in, “Hey, Snot, how’re you feeling?”
Ah, love – know thee no boundaries?
Wednesday night, late, while Brett slept on the couch in front of the flickering images of the SPEED channel, I sipped Echinacea Complete Care in beside the fire and marveled that while I must reek, I was so sick I couldn’t smell myself. In spite of that, I thought for a minute that I was getting better. I thought if I could sleep through the night and get up on time, I might get to work the next day.
Hah! I slept the vast majority of the twenty-four hour period known as ‘Thursday’ as well. I even ran a one-degree temperature for five or six hours last night.
But today! Ah, today! I’ve been awake now since TEN O’CLOCK! I did a load of laundry, and picked up after myself and my husband, and am alert enough now to actually sit in front of the goblinbox and blog! Halleluia!
Begin domestic aside:
Now. I realize my man’s been sick these past few days too. I also realize he’s a good goddamned guy in general. But he’s not half as sick as I am, and he never picks up the slack! I’ve been a slob this week because it was all I could do to boil myself some water, let alone wash dishes or pick up after myself, but he’s been well enough to go places and do things and… and… and STAY AWAKE! He took my slovenly behavior more or less as carte blanche to act like a pig. He didn’t even bother to rinse his dishes, which you’d think would have been ingrained in his thick hide by now.
Am I truly out of line to expect my roommate to occasionally, NOW AND THEN, to go just a tiny bit above and beyond? It’s not like I’m pissed off that I had to cook my own food and make my own tea with a staggering headache – I’ve lived with him long enough to know that bringing home a bottle of NyQuil (and calling me “Snot”) is as far as his sickroom ministrations ever go. But SHIT, people! When the primary homemaker is flat on her aching back with influenza, RINSE YOUR GODDAMNED DISHES ALREADY. Maybe toss a load in the washer, rather than letting the bathroom laundry basket overflow all over the floor. Put your garbage IN THE GARBAGE CAN. Put your shoes on the shoe rack and hang your outerwear where it belongs instead of creating an obstacle course of massive boots and piles of slippers, hats, coats, and jackets in the high-traffic areas your sick and almost-legally-blind-without-her-contact-lenses wife is trying to navigate WHILE RUNNING A FEVER!!!
{Chuckle.} Truly, it’s not that bad – nothing fifteen minutes of shuffling around didn’t set right. But when I surfaced enough to actually see the piles of dishes, garbage, and general crap we’d managed to pile up on every surface, I almost fainted. Snort!
Well, I believe it might be naptime again for the Mushlette. I’m off to check my email, maybe get another few ounces of water in this aching body, and get horizontal. Ciao, babies! BE WELL. (I am so serious.)
Score: Flu 1, Mush 0.
