Last night I left work and drove home listening to stuff from my iPod via my new iTrip FM transmitter, which is groovy but doesn’t sound half as good as XM radio.
When I got home I was exhausted. The flu isn’t entirely over yet, I guess. I nuked a frozen burrito, ate it, had a thermos of echinacea tea, and waddled bedward.
Five seconds after I dropped off to sleep, Mr. Brett came in and woke me up by flicking the overhead bulb on and off. “Why’d you do that?” I croaked.
“To see if you were here.”
“Where else would I be?” I said, and hacked up half a lung.
He came in and flopped down beside me on the bed. He made a few efforts at cuddling, but I’m fairly sure he was hoping to get laid and felt miffed to discover I was out for the day.
I drifted off to sleep again, only to be woken later by the damned television. I mumbled something about it being way too loud, but he couldn’t be bothered to get up and actually do anything about it. When I realized whatever movie was on was going to insist on continuing to indulge in automatic gun fights, I sighed heavily and got up.
I went downstairs and the entire house was on. All the lights were on, the TV was on, the stove was open, and in general Brett had just left everything running and come up to fall asleep in MY bed because I was tired.
Ugh.
I made the rounds, turning off and shutting down. I finished the last cup of tea in my thermos. I went back to bed.
And I woke up again at 2:30. Boing! Wide awake! I’m not like Brett, I can’t sleep from 7:30 until 6:00. I’m lucky anymore if I can sleep eight hours in 24.
I got up and went back to bed about three times, then gave up and read in front of the woodstove until 4:30, when I went and crashed out on the office daybed until my alarm woke me up at 8:00.
Today I feel much better, and am coughing less. I’m still tired a little, but I’ve been keeping the dairy to a minimum and I think it’s helping. No doubt when I get home in good shape I’ll have a giant redhead wanting to lie on me for for awhile; I guess I’ll just have to suffer through it. Snort!
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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.
