In which I copy her.

I’m at work. It’s a quarter after five on a Tuesday and I’m the only technician on the clock. My phone could ring at any minute! and these are the tabs I have open in my browser:

  • eBay > ThinkPad A30 A list of laptop-related items for sale.
  • DUN 678 Work-related troubleshooting stuff.
  • eMusic.com Surfing for music to download.
  • drhorrible.com Because I’m in love with this fuckin’ show.
  • BMI Phonebook For looking up local access numbers for customers.
  • cnn.com Perusing headlines, and wondering what the holy hell is wrong with the world.
  • screenshots.modemhelp.net Screenshots for most common operating systems. I mean, I totally forget the differences between WinME and Win2k when I’m doing tech support.
  • ping.fm For posting Twitters.
  • Recording Liars An article about Todd (who is Godd).

Your turn!

I received a new battery for my laptop today! I ran it down to 3%, and then plugged it in and now it’s charging. Soon, I will be able to sit more than 5 feet from an outlet AND BE ON THE INTERNET AT THE SAME TIME. Such heady stuff, my babies!

I’m eating chocolate because The Curse™ is descending upon me. (Actually, I’m eating a fudge pop-tart. (Yeah, yeah, it’s gross, but I wanted chocolate – damn neuroreceptors, anyway – and that’s all there was.))

[Note: the following link may contain TMI. YHBW.] I recently started charting again, not because I’m concerned with fertility – I’m SO not, I had my uterine lining scoured out, hoorah! – but because I’m tracking my PMS symptoms to see if they’re really that much of a pain in the arse or if I’m just a whiner.

I suspect it’s probably a little of both, but one needs must gather empirical data to see if she is, in fact, truly bloated three-quarters of the time or if it just seems that way ’cause she’s pudgy fat and it’s summertime. Snort!

 

In which I’ve had a mellow, gig-free weekend.

Friday was review day at work. Teh BF and I totally own that bitch and we both had great reviews. W00t! (Although I was a talkative dork in my review, and barely let management get a word in edgewise. I’ll have to continue to do really well at my actual job to make up for my lack of social skills. Jeez. You’d think by now I’d’ve learned to shut up already.) We went out after work and got drunk – on purpose – to celebrate. It was hella fun.

Kaje got scheduled to work both of my days off this weekend, so I’ve been home catching up on my life. Data organized, sleep caught up on, relationship with dog and G’ma rediscovered, laundry tackled: not being home for a few months really gets a girl behind on her chores. (I’d probably be home more if G’ma hadn’t made it clear that the boy ain’t sleepin’ over. I mean, she let me get away with it before. Oh, well.)

Saturday morning I went to the farmer’s market for a couple of hours. I bought bread, veggies, and some Mexican food I ate while listening to the string quartet that was the day’s entertainment. I bought lemonade. I walked home. It was pretty lovely, even though I was still drunk from the night before.

Saturday night KJ came over after work and we ate the rest of the lentil soup.

I’m almost caught up with my laundry. I have to say that I might not be all that enthralled with hand-dyed sundresses; I purchased two this summer and washing them kinda sucks. They bleed like stuck pigs, they streak no matter how carefully I wring them out, and they try to stain the sink. Bah.

My music library has been reconstructed and lives on my laptop, where it should live! Hurrah! I’m updating album art right now, and tonight I’ll sync my 5g iPod for the first time in over half a year. It’ll be awesome. This whole project has pretty much sucked arse.

Today, the weather is stunning. Warm, dry, and breezy, it’s perfect laundry-line weather… Speaking of which, I’d better go deal with my sundresses.

Tagged with:
 

In which there’s another unrelated list.

Friday, I played a tasting room with the boys. Got drunk on wine.

Saturday, I did this.

Sunday, I napped. A lot.

Monday, I worked.

Today, I upgraded my WP installation to the latest version, and downloaded some jazz from here.

How the hell have YOU been?

Tagged with:
 

In which there was an unexpected overnight package.

Since I have a gig tonight immediately after work, I had Kaje drive me home on our lunch hour so I could do my hair and face and change clothes. (I straightened my hair, but blew off the clothes-changing and merely packed my makeup into my purse. Lazy girl.) Waiting on the kitchen table when I got home was an overnight envelope, containing:

Formula 303

Pills! (Homeopathic muscle relaxants! From him and her!) And a love letter! W00t!

I *heart* you guys. Srsly. Thank you.

Tagged with:
 

In which I’m the proud owner of a shiny new airline ticket.

First of all, to all you “online marketers with a passion for blogging” fucktards: fuck the hell off. Stop linking to me. I hate you. Srsly.

Second of all, to everyone else: it’s official! I’ve bought a ticket to Vegas! I’ll be there from September 28th through October 3rd. YOU SHOULD BE THERE TOO. Srsly! Come celebrate my birthday with me! IN VEGAS!

Third of all, come see me play this weekend: at Sapolil’s tasting room on Friday night, or at the Onion Festival on Saturday! Srsly. Two days! You pick! * ** ***

– – – – –
* If I had any deep thoughts I’d share them with you, but sadly I’m vacuous and silly and enjoy from the very root of my being both “srsly” and the over-use of exclamation points in written prose.
** Also, today at work there was a dial-up outage in Washington state that caused me to have to say the exact same thing over and over to many, many callers, and such a situation always reduces my general intelligence.
*** Finally, I had a mango after lunch. I know that seems unrelated, but my teeth are very close together and when I get stuff stuck between them it itches and I don’t like it and I no longer have floss in my desk so I had to do call center work for HOURS with itchy teeth. Srsly. !!!

 

In which I bitch and moan.

The best thing about blogging is that one can complain all she wants. Which is exactly what I’m going to do. You probably should not read this:

My neck and upper back are totally fucked up. I can’t turn my neck, and have to rotate my entire upper body to look at things not directly in front of me. I feel really, really, really sorry for myself. In addition to the pain, I’m on day three of what seems like an endless anxiety attack, which means I’m essentially misinterpreting normal bodily sensations as NEAR DEATH SYMPTOMS and am swimming in adrenaline and forgetting to breathe, like a dumb ass. It makes my muscles hurt. And on top of the misery of all that, I seem to be retaining water. In the middle of my cycle. For no good goddamned reason.

Someone should, like, fucking shoot me. Srsly. I’m a waste of perfectly good oxygen.

In other news, I watched Brazil last night. I TOTALLY LOVE THAT MOVIE.

 

In which a picture is worth a thousand wo- …oh screw it. Here’s some pix of Ritzville.

On Saturday, the Kings and I played the main stage from 1.30 to 2.30:

Ritzville Main Stage

And then we played a 2-hour set in the Pastime, a wonderfully reesty little bar across the street from the main stage packed with the Best Audience Evar™, from 4 to 6:

Pastime

It was mad wicked fun, and I signed posters and a guitar and posed for photos with fans (“Because you’re gonna be REALLY famous someday!”) and now I’m thinking I might just wanna play music for a living… if I can do it at venues with roadies and stage managers and sound engineers and complimentary bottled water by the case and a musicians’ hospitality lounge serving food and free beer.

Because that kind of gig? IS WAY FUN.

For more pics, visit Kaje’s Flickr set.

Tagged with:
 

In which there’s another little road trip that will cost more than it earns. (I mean, we don’t do this shit for money, people. We do it, when gas costs four-plus-dollars a gallon, for the attention!)

RitzvilleThis weekend’s gig is about two hours away in a town called Ritzville, which means more driving and more conspicuous gas consumption on the part of the band. Since we’re playing the main stage at 1:30, we’ll have to leave W2 around ten in the morning.

I’m having a clothing crisis, people. I’ve finally realized that the guys in this band wear jeans and t-shirts (and the occasional Hawaiian shirt, for no apparent reason) exclusively, and that what I used to think of as “gig clothes” just isn’t apropos. This is a blues band, and we’re – I guess – aiming for a certain kind of style.

I basically need to go shopping in a What Would Janice Wear? mood, and buy some cool shirts. And some clunky shoes. Or boots. Or funky scarves or hats or what have you. Maybe I’ll hit Bimart on the way home tonight and pick up a Western shirt and a straw hat, and wear ’em tomorrow with some weird hippie accoutrements and that cool scarf from mmmFiber and call it style.

Eh. We’ll see. All I know is that I’ve got between the hours of 8 and 12 this evening to accomplish the following: go home, scratch my dog, make soup for dinner, do laundry, find two somethings to wear for tomorrow’s gigs, pack my makeup and set lists and tambourine and extra shoes and whatever into a bag, help teh BF get his car drive-worthy, relocate to KJ’s place, get laid, and get to sleep at a reasonable hour so I can get up AT EIGHT! ON A SATURDAY! FOR FUCK’S SAKE!

Then: load up, get out, get coffee, meet the band at Southgate, (Hurry up!) redistribute gear into the two cars because it’s too expensive to drive the band van. Then caravan. For two hours. (And wait!) To arrive in a town that will most likely be utterly packed and impossible to park in. Once actually at Ritzville, we’ll try to find KJ’s will-call ticket and then I probably won’t see him again until 2:40 or so, after the main stage set, and the band will run around (Hurry up!) trying to figure out where we’re supposed to be and wondering if we’ll have decent monitors. Then as soon as that set’s done, we’ll move ourselves and Curtis’ drums and the rest of the gear to a bar and set up for a 4-6 afternoon set, then (And wait!) if we’re lucky there will be food, then more music-making (hopefully to a packed house!), and after that (Hurry up!) we’ll load out. And THEN there’s another 2-hour drive to get back home! (And wait!) Where I will probably drink rapidly and heavily and pass out at eleven.

Sunday, I will be sleeping. Don’t call me. *giggle*

 

In which I mumble about software in a way that is of no interest to anyone but myself.

I can’t figure out what the fuck to do about PIM.

Once upon a time, I used Outlook on my computer and carried a synced PocketPC. Email, address book, calendar, tasks: all in one place and portable.

I no longer carry a PocketPC so I’m trying to keep all my data online, where I can get to it from any computer or my phone with no fuss. I’ve been auditioning various calendars, task managers, and webmail interfaces for a couple of years now.

I have most of my stuff at Gmail currently, but I don’t like their lack of old-school folders or drag-and-drop capability. (I don’t like Google calendar either, truth be told. And while I’ve tried to love Google Docs, somehow I don’t.) I also don’t like my Google user name, but the other names I’d want have been taken and I’d lose all my other Google content or have to move it if I moved to a new account…

I’ve tried Yahoo! Mail but the ads piss me off. I’ve tried my local Horde installation but while it’s robust, it’s fugly. I’ve tried to find server-side applications I could install and host here at the ‘box, but most of them don’t do everything I want or they’re ugly or expensive or need to run on architecture I don’t have.

I’ve tried several web-based solutions, but the good ones are all for-pay and end up costing more than buying a locally-run application, and I could just go back to Outlook for free…

Hmm. The more I think about it, the more I suspect that what I’m really looking for is Outlook. And some way to sync it to a web-based service, which means Plaxo.

Gah.

In other news, after nearly two years of inactivity I recreated my mush email address at goblinbox.com and within two minutes the box started getting spam. Fucking spammers! A pox on you all!

 

In which there’s more sympatico.

Saturday night I told Kaje that I couldn’t figure out how he turned out so well.

I’ve heard all kinds of utterly insane stories from him in the past two months, and in them he is – not to put too fine a point on it – a total fucking punk. The stories are laff-riot funny most of the time (unless they’re like this), but underneath all the wacky, crazy action is a person who is clearly just about totally off his fucking rocker.

Currently, though, he’s not a punk at all. He’s big-hearted, and a fantastically honest communicator. He’s earnest. And present. And his bullshit tolerance is zero but he’s nice at the same time. A complex creature, really, who becomes more and more worth it with each passing day.

“So how did you get here from there?” I asked. “I know there were some women in that ten year gap you never talk about, but I haven’t heard shit about any of that. I think it’s time you tell me about it. So give it.”

We were in his apartment. It was late at night. He frowned a little.

“I need to know this shit anyway,” I said. “Boundaries, past hurts. Blah blah blah. If I knew you were jealous, for instance, I might be less likely to sit on other people’s laps. It’s useful to know where one’s partner’s weird spots are.”

He mumbled something about how he thinks talking about exes is disrespectful and that’s why he hasn’t done it, and then – because he’s the person he is – he shook it off and got comfortable on the couch and started talking.

Continue reading »