In which you totally crack the hell up.
Thanks, GW.
*giggle*
Category Archives: Blurbs
Update: Dinner party? Hell no.
In which I tell you about my day.
…what actually happened today is that I spent most of the day in bed, reading ebooks from Fictionwise, suffering bouts of awful Cramps From Hell™.
If I were to anthropomorphize my own guts, my uterus would be the biggest, meanest, pissed off-dest BITCH you ever met. And she would be punching me in the head for no apparent reason.
In other news, a tiny muscle on the inside of my right knee has been spasming for two hours now. FOR NO APPARENT REASON.
I’m going back to bed. I’m obviously a useless mess. Hurumph.
Winter Is Cold
And I hate being cold.
I think Nature’s just showing off with this 6-degrees-outside crap. We all know there’s really no reason to be that far below freezing. (Actually, it’s 23 degrees out right now. But it was 6 when I drove home from band practice Thursday night.)
I’m sitting here at my desk in my office drinking a rapidly-cooling latte and surfing Fictionwise for something to read in front of the fire. My office is cold.
Brett’s going to want me to do crap with him today, he’s got this list he wants to get through but as usual I don’t really want to do what he’s doing. I want instead to do some cosmetic housecleaning and go shopping and invite some people out for manicotti and too much wine for dinner.
Bread got up early and drove the dump truck to the dump. It had about six months’ worth of household garbage in it and, he says, most of it was frozen to the deck and he had to kick and shovel it to get it to slide out.
We live too far out in the middle of nowhere for garbage service, so we used to burn the majority of our garbage, composting the wet stuff and recycling the rest. Then Bread got tired of emptying the ash from the burn barrel, so we switched to throwing everything into garbage bags and into the back of the dump truck. My recycling and composting juju is gone – I’m a terrible world citizen and you should mock me. (It’s incredible how much garbage two people make in six months, when you can see it just piling up in the back of the dump truck. It’s sick. Literally.)
In other news, I haven’t brushed my hair since Thursday.
Dog. Snow. Thing.
In which I list three unrelated, random things. Because this is my blog, damn it, and damn those ‘what to write about’ blog treatises too, because I’ve been blogging since before there was a fucking word for it and I’ll write whatever the hell I want to!
One. I made meatloaf for Bread’s dinner the night before last, and neglected to put it away fast enough. When I came downstairs around 8:30 that night, Bread was asleep on the couch and the meatloaf, which had been sitting in a pyrex dish on top of the stove, was gone.
Shiva had very carefully stood up on his hind legs and eaten a whole pound of meatloaf without knocking the casserole dish to the floor, since the sound of it shattering would surely have waken even Bread and earned that dog an ass whoopin’.
I mean, a whole pound of meatloaf?! Bad dog! (Clever, quiet, sneaky bad dog!)
Two. This wholly unwelcome news is just in:
THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN QUAD CITIES HAS ISSUED A SNOW ADVISORY…WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM 7 PM THIS EVENING TO 6 AM CST THURSDAY.
A FAST MOVING WINTER STORM SYSTEM WILL MOVE FROM EASTERN NEBRASKA TO WESTERN ILLINOIS BY THURSDAY MORNING…BRINGING WIDESPREAD SNOWFALL TO THE AREA. THE HEAVIEST SNOW WILL OCCUR FROM ABOUT MIDNIGHT TO 4 AM…WITH A BAND OF 2 TO 4 INCHES EXPECTED FROM EASTERN IOWA INTO WEST CENTRAL ILLINOIS.
THE SNOW WILL BE HEAVY AT TIMES…WITH VISIBILITY REDUCED TO A QUARTER MILE OR LESS AND SNOWFALL RATES POSSIBLY AS HIGH AS 1 INCH PER HOUR FOR A SHORT TIME. SNOWFALL TOTALS BY MORNING ARE EXPECTED TO REACH 2 TO 4 INCHES.
Guess what? The shitty weather’s here! Maybe I’ll get lucky and get snowed in and have to read books in front of the fire and drink lattes.
Once again I’m soooo thankful I have a 4WD! Not.
Three. Yesterday, Bucket gave me a cute little case for my external hard drive enclosure. You really can’t get much geekier than having a custom zippy case with a shoulder strap just for carrying your external USB drive around with you.
In other news, it’s five o’clock, and I’m off to the tavern for a hard-earned cocktail. Okay, all I did was move a couple of web sites and talk on the phone a few times, so perhaps “hard-earned” is pushing it. But it’s five and I’m still awake by God so I figure I’ve earned something.
Painfully Beauty-Challenged
In which it is revealed that I don’t deserve a nice color.
I believe I mentioned I had my hair cut and colored in Denver, yes?
Well.
While I was getting my hair washed, the stylist talked me into getting my hair colored because it was so very straw-like and icky. She used something she called demi-permanent hair color, and explained it was a little like an old-school cellophane in that it would coat and seal my very fried hair (two box jobs, a highlight, and a lowlight in the past 9 months) and make it all shiny again.
Yay!
And it was. She was right. It was smooth and shiny and all one color!
At the Super 8 in Nebraska, Bread and I soaked in the spa and swam a few laps in the pool. Afterward, he took a shower but I didn’t. I just let my hair dry with all those chemicals in it, and I didn’t wash it until the next day.
It ate through my color, I think, because it’s lightened noticably every time I’ve washed it since then.
I’m an idiot.
Time Line
In which I’m late for work. Again. But there’s a mix for you to download!
I neglected to change my PPC clock settings from ‘travel’ to ‘home.’ This means that when my alarm went off this morning, it wasn’t a quarter to eight. It was a quarter to nine, and I, as always, was late to work.
Oh, yeah, and it was below freezing outside. With snow flurries.
~+~+~
On our drive home last Sunday, I took control of the noise situation in the cab for awhile and played the following mix. Since we were tired, and it was grey and overcast and gloomy all day long, I made it a mellow mix. (Truck said, “If I was driving, I’d make you turn it off. But I’m not, and I dug it.”)
Behold, my Iowa 80 Rainex Mix, for your downloading pleasure:
- Let’s Stay Together ~ Al Green
- Lover I Don’t Have To Love ~ Bright Eyes
- Woman King ~ Iron and Wine
- The Way We Get By ~ Spoon
- Getting Closer ~ Hird
- Keep You Kimi ~ Hird
- Drawing Curtains ~ Buck 65
- Promise The Bite ~ matt pond PA
- Prototype ~ Andre 3000
- Feels Just Like It Should ~ Jamiroquai
- Lucky ~ Radiohead
- Aganjú ~ Bebel Gilberto
- Moving On ~ Hird
- Can’t Get The Stuff No More ~ Tampa Red
- I Want A Little In My Bowl ~ Nina Simone
- I’ve Been Thinking ~ Handsome Boy Modeling School
- Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing ~ Stevie Wonder
- I’m Still In Love With You ~ Al Green
- Oh! Darling ~ Beatles
- Just The Two Of Us ~ Bill Withers
- Lover, You Should Have Come Over ~ Jeff Buckley
Special thanks for some of these tracks to Squirrelville and The Sean Show, both of whom have caused me to buy CDs because of MP3s I’d gotten from them. (Which is proof, to me, that filesharing makes money. So if you really dig any of these tracks, go buy the music. Or see a show. Or have sex with that geeky drummer who never gets any. You know, contribute.)
If you use iTunes, downloading the XML file should enable you to import the playlist easily.
Oh, to download all these tracks at once try the super trick downTHEMall plug-in for Firefox.
~+~+~
In other news, if you haven’t listened to this little slut of a track lately, you totally should because, holy shit, what killer production values!
Web Silliness
Look, I spelled my name! Continue reading Web Silliness
Buying MP3s
I got India Cafe take-out for lunch today: dhal makhani, saag paneer, rice, kabli chana, naan, curried cabbage and peas, some potato salad thing, pakora. Yum. (And the boy that works the register? Still cute. Love those long-lashed big brown eyes.)
I spent some quality time playing with iTunes this morning, particularly the new Just For You section (which offers recommendations based on purchases, like Amazon.com) and their super amusing Celebrity Playlists.
Can I just say that Bill Maher is gay? I love him no matter who he sleeps with, but if he’s trying to out himself by putting the Bee Gee’s How Deep Is Your Love and Divinyls’ I Touch Myself on his playlist… well, that’s certainly one way to do it. Chick Corea’s first selection was a Bela Bartok concerto, which is so wonderfully dork I can barely stand it. My favorite celeb list, oddly enough, was David Duchovny’s, because I own or want or at least enjoy every track on the whole damn thing. I almost couldn’t relate to Ben Folds’ playlist at all, which made me feel like a dork, except for his brilliant inclusion of both Harry Nilsson and ELO.
The Just For You section recommended to me a whole lotta of stuff I adore but no longer own, and considering that yesterday was payday I almost went nuts and bought it all (can I point out that when you have a BIG FAT CONNECTION AT WORK BECAUSE YOU WORK AT THE INTERNET, you can download entire albums in MOMENTS?!?!) but I didn’t. Not yet, anyway. If I had any sense I’d boycot the Apple music store altogether. (Except all you have to do to break the DRM is burn the tracks to CD and then re-rip them, it’s not any more labor intensive than driving one’s ass to the music store and back.) But when you want a song and you’re me and you’re at work, damn but it’s easy to iTunes that fucker right into your iPod before you even notice you’ve done it. I did it yesterday, and it was so easy I almost neglected to put the debit into my checkbook register.
And at least when using iTunes one doesn’t have to fear Sony’s evil rootkit… yet.
The Retards At US Cellular: Not So Retarded
In which a broken cell phone is miraculously resurrected.
So Mr. B came home after work last night and said the guy at the US Cellular kiosk had managed to make him feel like a total moron.
“How on earth did that happen?” I asked, chopping tomatoes for salad and thinking of all the times the humanoids in the cell phone kiosks at Wal*Mart had made me feel like a fucking brain surgeon: namely, every time I’ve ever had to deal with them.
“Welllll…” he said, “I took my phone in to get it fixed, right? I handed it to the guy, and I’ll be damned if he didn’t just turn the fucker on.”
“What?!?” I put the knife down and turned to my sheepishly grinning husband.
“He took it, opened it and looked at the battery, then he just… turned it on. It calls out, it accepts calls. It works fine. I felt like an idiot.”
“Dude, no way. I tried to turn that thing on all weekend! I even took the battery from my phone and put it in there, and it still wouldn’t work!”
“I guess he had the touch. Because the fucker sure as hell wouldn’t work for me, and now it works just fine. I don’t think I’ve ever felt quite so stupid.”
“Oh,” I said. “I have. Don’t worry about it, because it’ll definitely happen again. I mean, cell phones, dude.”
Rainy Days and Email
It’s grey, rainy, chilly, and utterly shitty outside today.
I woke up this morning, peeled open an eyelid, and looked at the bedroom clock. It said it was 2:30. I got up, padded downstairs, and started making myself a latte before I noticed the stove clock said it was nine-thirty already.
Shit. Late to work. But it was so dark out I’d thought I’d been on time. Damn, damn, damn. So I went into the furnace room, opened the woodstove up (we’re heating with wood, yo), dug through my bag for my phone and called Buzzdoctor. Got his voicemail:
Me: Hey, it’s me. I slept through my alarm or something. I dunno. I’m gonna hop in the shower and I’ll be there… in a bit. Or so.
Then I finished making my latte, took a shower (without brushing my hair first so I’ve got something of a left coast dreaded hippy thing going on today but it’s all up in a scrunchie), dressed myself, stoked the stove, watered the pets, made sure that everything that was supposed to be off was and that everything that was supposed to be on was on, grabbed my bag and waddled fuzzily out the door to the jeep, which was chilly and damp.
I’m still not awake. This kind of weather makes me feel like my IQ is about 60.
~+~+~
When Keef moved goblinbox.com to this, its current server, he gave me the username ‘mush’ which makes sense ’cause that’s my name (don’t wear it out). However, I’ve been using that username in context with this particular domain for so long that it is on EVERY SPAM LIST IN KNOWN SPACE, which means that the non-deletable email box is FULL OF FUCKING SPAM.
Which is why, if you’ve tried to email me in the past week, your mail has been returned with an ‘edquota/target folder is full’ error.
I’m in the webmail interface right now, deleting spam. This project should take, oh, about TEN HOURS because I don’t have root on the box this site is on. Yes, I’ve enabled SpamAssasin to delete spam rather than putting it in my inbox. Ugh. Oh, wait, I guess I could just download it all using a mail client – that would get it off the server. Duh.