Oh, my stars and garters!

Oh, god, I crack myself up.

I also have no discipline; I couldn't even wait until midnight.

April fool!

P.S. I added some content, so check back before it's gone. (12:20 a.m.)

P.P.S. If Roo's fixed his site by the time you get there, you can still see the screenshots here and here. (2:37 a.m.) 

P.P.P.S. April Fool's Day is kind of an asshole holiday, isn't it? (2:38 a.m.)

Best sick day ever

I woke up around noon and wandered around the house for a while until I found being awake slightly painful and highly unsatisfactory. I called in to work, took some medicine, and laid back down for four hours of bonus sleep. I was dreaming that someone had set up a carnival in my front yard (you'd think that would be a fun dream, but I was mainly concerned with keeping all the weirdo ferris wheel riders from coming inside to use the bathroom) when I was awakened by a loud, nasty little thunderstorm.

Wain, whom I never get to see these days, came home right about then, and we sat on the porch and watched it blow over as the sun set. Then I got dressed and went out to get my goddamn precious Arby's, which was delicious but a little cold because I had to drive across town and back to get it.

Now I'm mucking around on the internet, blowing my nose a lot, and trying to decide if I should make a hot toddy and watch a movie or just go back to bed. Generally, having a cold is pretty damn boring. But I don't mind being just sick enough to justify staying home, taking fun medication, and napping, but not so sick that I can't appreciate these things.

Good vs. Evil

Good:
Six-dollar haircuts

Bad:
Menstrual cramps
Incipient colds
House burglars (no, not mine)

Evil wins, dammit. If I could just...make it...to...Arby's for dinner, the balance might be tipped. But I'm afraid it's cold cereal and rice milk for me tonight. Stupid evil.

Blorp, blorp.

My homemade basil mayo is viscouslicious. I would gargle with it if I could.

Add oil slowly

Today is a workday. The previous three were not. Obviously, I didn't go anywhere, despite my big talk. I was going to, but my parents said they were coming. Then they said they weren't, but by then I'd already talked myself out of a trip completely. So I saved my money and stayed home. I ate sushi. I watched a lot of TV. It was fine.

Tonight I would like to try to make mayonnaise. I've never done this before, and I hope it doesn't suck because Eric's making BLTs to soak it up.

Lessons

 

Squeal, boy! Squeeeeeeal!

I just finished watching the best thing, a National Geographic special on Hogzilla. A couple of crazyasses in Georgia claimed to have shot a 12-foot-long, 1,000-pound pig, but nobody believed them. They decided to exhume the corpse for measurements and DNA testing, so they called in a team of scientists to don biohazard suits and dig the fuckin' thing up with a backhoe. You can bet I was kicking my heels into the sofa with unbridled glee when I saw that.

Other highlights: A Texas rancher who expresses his wish to end his feral hog problem with a nuclear bomb but instead resignedly loads his rifle and demonstrates how he must pick them off one by one, and a domestic hog with a pair so impressive that each of its testicles is as big as a human head.

The verdict: "Hogzilla" is a must see (must squee?). A+++.

Good, good Friday

Day off today. I got a massage. When I called the massage therapist for an appointment she signed off with a cheerful "Bring the pain, baby!" 

I obediently brought it, all tidily bundled up in my muscles. She got up on my whiny lower back and ground that shit into a pulp with her knees. I was a little sore and out of it for most of the evening, but now I feel pretty good. Oh, yes, I do.

Afterwards I had a terrible dinner with my sister. (The food was terrible, my sister was fine.) Tin Star is simply not very good.

It's our own fault. We knew full well that Tex-Mex chains are never very good. In fact, I defy you to find me one that will offer anything more than just-edible food and a dull, bloated stomach, grease-coated tongue, and vague sense of regret and wrongness afterwards. And listen, there is absolutely no reason to go to a Tex-Mex chain in Austin; it'd be like going out of your way to find an Olive Garden in Naples.

Despite that, we felt our reasoning for going there was rock-solid. It's in the same shopping center as three other places my sister needed things from, and they serve margaritas. Why, it would have been the apex of foolishness not to go to Tin Star for dinner!

But then, after our bland, greasy meal (and I can tell you the grilled onions will be haunting me for some time), my sister could find nothing she needed. Tin Star, Old Navy, Rack Room Shoes, Sears: all can kiss my vigorously Shiatsued ass. At least the company was good, and it's always a treat to make fun of the trashy Juniors' department at Sears.

Later I went over to Colleen and Rob's house. There was cake. Chocolate Guinness cake. Sweet, rich, mellow, just a hint of yeast. You don't even know how good it was, even though I just told you.

This is what my boyfriend's right arm looks like now:

He designed it himself:

It just needs one more touch-up session to fill in some color and go over some lines, and it'll be done. What a champ!

(Because he's just so rude!)

Oh, how I love the Rude Pundit.

This is a placeholder post.

The weather's fine, I'm fine, the camera's fine, work's fine, home's fine. Fine, fine, fine.

I'll get off work and make a big batch of avocado soup, if I know what's good for me.

Hour Photo

I think that's all. Good night!

3:30 a.m.

(Previous pictures after the jump.)

Tracking

I get my camera tomorrow, if the FedEx website is to be believed. I have to admit that I'm pretty excited about being able to justify an upgrade, although this in no way blunts my fervent hope that whoever took my perfectly good Canon A70 has a lifetime filled with minor but uncomfortable maladies such as scabies, chronic constipation, and corns.

Ok, I'm done, I promise. Over. It. Let us never speak of this again.

So. In honor of this momentous occasion, and to make up for the lack of visual elements here over the past week, I plan on taking and posting a picture each hour, or as near to that as possible, from the time I open the package until the time I go to bed. This exercise promises to be pointless, bandwidth-heavy, and full of poorly lit office and living room shots, so be sure to check back often!

Living will

I'm not being glib when I say I don't know that I'm all that concerned with what would happen to my body if I were to become severely brain damaged. After a certain point of incapacitation, I think being allowed to die is the preferable option, but if someone feels there's hope enough to hang on to whatever's left, I guess that'd be fine too. I'm not sentimental; whatever happened, I figure I wouldn't be around to see it.

But under no circumstances would I ever want images of my atrophied body beamed around the world so I can become the unwitting poster girl for either side of a divisive political debate, so people can start an insipid ribbon campaign in my name, so politicians can use my family's pain for leverage, so people who never met me can argue about whether my tendency to track shiny things with my eyes indicates the presence of my buried soul or the helpless, one-off spasms of what's left of my synapses.

That's about the most disgusting, least dignified fate I can think of. And meanwhile, where's the hand-wringing and emergency legislation when someone, say, dies of something treatable because she couldn't afford health care?

Low expectations

A day off! With bacon, a bloody mary, and a thunderstorm that raged overhead at full bore while the sun still shone from the west.  Also what by all rights should be a nasty little hangover but isn't. This has turned out to be a fine afternoon. I wonder if going out to pick up another bottle of vodka and some thick pork chops would be overkill.

Stroll

I ordered a new camera today to replace the one that got stolen. I was very careful with the previous one, but this time anyone who thinks about starting to consider so much as coveting it is going to get their fingers broken.

I'm holding off on the cell phone purchase for a little while; I really don't need one right now, although I'm starting to realize I used it a lot more than I thought I did.

This afternoon was good. I got up and went to the Alamo downtown for the SXSW film screening thingy. My friend Greg's short was first and I was exactly on time, so I walked right in, sat down, watched it, and left five minutes later with Greg to have coffee. I liked it, but he didn't seem really happy with it. Neither did the Chronicle, as we found out when we read the review a few minutes later.  I thought it was pretty damn charming, but what do I know?

After we split up, I walked around downtown for a while. I stopped by the day show at Emo's to see if my friends were there. I was hungry, though, so I didn't look very hard at all, just walked through once, saw no one, and decided to keep going. I walked back up to Congress and got the kafta plate at Marakesh. If there's a better lunch for six bucks, I wish you'd tell me about it.

Then I walked back up to the Capitol. I had a cigarette on the nice sunny lawn, and then cut through the first floor on my way to work. It seemed very staid in there compared to all the music and hubub a few blocks south.

But while I was thinking about how it felt like a totally different world in there, I noticed something. The Capitol was jammed with bunch of smug white guys in gray suits with lobbyist name tags and tidy, parted hair, saying things like "I know! I know! That's what I told him! But I think we can still work something out," into their cell phones.

Meanwhile, most of downtown--and especially the courtyard of the Hilton at Fourth and Neches--had been jammed with a bunch of smug white guys in ringer tees with industry badges and artfully tousled hair, screaming things like "I know! I know! That's what I told him! But I think we can still work something out," into their BlackBerries.

I guess it's no great revelation that political lobby groups and the entertainment industry tend to employ the exact same brand of bottom-feeding shitbags, but the juxtaposition still made me laugh.

Wishing wishing wishing

I hear tell there's a rumor we might could get a long weekend out of Easter. If it's true (and please, please, please, let it be so), I'm getting an oil change, kidnapping my boy, and getting the hell out of here for a few days. Probably to the beach, although I've never been to Mexico, which is starting to seem ridiculous after living in Texas for 25 years.

I am a bad friend.

Roone got drunk and he fell down.

In his diminished capacity he was hilariously unable to stop me from taking pictures with his camera.

I had to do this. I'm sorry. Roone, I'm sorry. Everyone, I'm sorry.

Don't feel too bad for Roone, though. He punched me in the arm--hard--and kicked my shins when I told him I was going to post these. He's so cute when he's loaded!

Good stuff

I've got a pizza in the oven, a cheesecake in the fridge, a beer within arm's length, Bob Mould on the stereo, and my sketchbook out for the first time in weeks. I'm taking a break from all that to say I feel just fine for the first time in a while.

Perishable

Wow, I got a huge box of frozen Chicago-style deep-dish pizzas delivered to my doorstep this afternoon. I love deep-dish pizza. JuicyV, you're the greatest!

Of course like a toddler who's way more interested in the boxes than the toys that came in them, I was almost as excited about the huge block of dry ice that kept them cold all the way down to Texas. Eric and I have a kitchen sink full of fog merrily roiling away as I type. Dry ice is fun. I'd take a picture, but I lost my camera in what will surely be remembered as the great tragedy of the twenty-first century.

Consolation prize

Well, I get a bit of a tax refund this year. Maybe I'll replace my camera with a nicer one.

I overslept and missed my friend's SXSW film screening today. I am a shithead. A tired shithead.

But I had a nice lunch with Jill instead. I am a tired shithead who loves her sister.

And it looks like I might have another chance to go on Thursday.  I am a tired shithead who loves her sister and will probably get to see her friend's short film later this week. Hooray!

Argh. Argh. Argh.

I had people over for drinks last night, mostly coworkers, although some people I don't know--all friends of friends
--showed up too.

Around 4:30 a.m. I realized I didn't know where my purse was.

At the end of the party, after searching for an hour, we found it in a dark part of my backyard, away from the deck where everyone had been sitting. The small amount of cash in my wallet, my cell phone, and, worst of all, my digital camera were gone. Fortunately, I still have the wallet itself, license, credit cards, and Lomo.

Wain called my phone this afternoon, and some dude answered but of course wouldn't say who or where he was. The guy neglected to turn the phone off, however, and stuck it in his pocket or something. We could hear a bunch of random guys talking in the background for several minutes until I started shaking and hung up. I suspended my service, which in hindsight is what I should have done right away, but at the time I was quite drunk and extremely angry. (A lucky few have read the drunken, furious post I wrote to calm myself down this morning and deleted shortly thereafter.)

I don't know what happened exactly. I know I put my purse in my bedroom when I got home from work last night. I don't remember taking it out back at any point after that, and I know for a fact I didn't just toss it out into the dark recesses of my yard. I'm also pretty sure everything was in there before the party. But who knows? I was distracted and busy by getting ready and playing hostess all night.

There has to be some explanation; I don't believe anyone who was in my house last night would mess with my shit. My bedroom window was open; maybe someone off the street climbed in and grabbed it? But that doesn't make much sense. Why would anyone sneak into a house where a party was going on, grab one bag out of several (I cringe when I think of how many people I told to just leave their stuff in my room), rummage through it, selectively snatch some valuables, and then go out of their way to dump it in the backyard, with a bunch of smokers sitting maybe twenty feet away?

I suppose it's possible. I don't know. This is just really confusing. 

What I do know is that I'm sad and freaked out, and I miss my camera already.

That's my drama for the day. On the bright side, I had a really good time hanging out with everyone at the party. I'll just have to be more careful with my house and my stuff from now on.

I lied.

I can't shut up, and I know it. You know it. But really, I do want to take a short break from posting inane shit. I just wanted to say two quick things.

1. If you want a really excellent resource for all the free shows and parties during SXSW next week, please visit Dan's comprehensive and meticulously compiled Showlist. I plan on hitting a few things in the afternoons--I really, really want to see Calexico--but I have to say it's extremely painful to tear yourself away from free beer, bands, and food on a gorgeous afternoon just to go to stupid work.

2. My boyfriend is really fun to watch television with. We were flipping around and saw the end of a commercial for a light-up magnifying contraption called the Owl.

Dorky, earnest man on TV: And with the Owl, I don't worry about people making fun of me for my poor eyesight...

Eric: Haha! Fuckin' blind-o!

Oh, my.

I'm going to take an Ambien now, and that should shut me up but good. Back on Monday, for real this time, unless something really amazing happens. You never know.

Hush

I think I need to shut up for a little while. Back on Monday.

Would you like to play a game?

I saw the last half of WarGames last night. It's a pretty silly movie, but it reminded me of the monster crush I had on Matthew Broderick in middle school, and also of my eighth-grade computer literacy class.

The class was taught by the very reluctant shop teacher and consisted solely of watching WarGames with all the cuss words bleeped out and a lot of BASIC programming. In other words, it was completely useless. But I still remember a little BASIC, and thanks to the TRS-80 Level I BASIC simulator, I was able to create a program a few years ago to simplify the restaurant-selection process at lunchtime. That was great and all, but my favorite programs were always simple, juvenile, and infinite. For example:

10 PRINT "SUCK IT, BITCHBAGS!"
20 GOTO 10
RUN

Just type that into the simulator, sit back, and watch the fun that really does never end. Woo hoo!

(yeah, and it's "shall we play a game," but i've misremembered it the other way for years, can't let it go, and, most importantly, don't care.)

I played a joke on myself!

I forgot I straightened my room up a little this afternoon, so I was briefly startled when I went in there after work tonight and was able to see the floor for the first time in weeks.

Me: Boo! All your laundry's put away!

Also Me: Eeek! I'm a slob!

I mean really, I shouldn't walk into a room and gasp because it's clean. That's just fucked up.

(I started to write messed up there, but then I realized the unintentional pun and changed it. But I had to tell you about it anyway because it's dumb and clumsy but kind of funny. Right? Ok, fine, be that way. I'm going to bed.)

Bleah bluh buh

I'm at work. There is nothing to say about this or much of anything else I did today. Oh, except I took a break to get pizza and play pinball. The game, the name of which I don't even remember, had a stupid billiards theme, but it also had a good multiball--maybe six or seven of the little fuckers. Very exciting. That and the sunset on the walk back to work were the best things that happened today.

My new friend

I went to the doctor today. The waiting room was the usual stuffy box full of crumpled magazines and sniffling, hacking people. I was trying not to think too much about how I was surrounded by disease vectors when a man sat down next to me and started talking very loudly about flu season and germs.

All I have to say:

1. Fried chicken is delicious.
2. So are prickly pear margaritas.

Tomorrow will be a carnivalesque whirlwind of life, fun, beauty, and insight. I'm sure of it.

Sad sack

Oh, I keep breaking things. I punctured my exercise ball, which doubles as my office chair, with a staple. I tore the zipper on my favorite sweatshirt. I broke my spring-loaded access card clip thingy, which you'd think was no big deal, but it lit up with blinky lights and was a gift from Wain. I tried to fix it, and it's completely mangled.

I also found a bone shard in my sausage pizza--how many times do I have to tell myself: no ground meats?--and my glasses keep fogging up when I go outside. The cumulative effect of all this is that I feel a little loser-ish tonight, aw, poor little office dork, woe is me, Murphy's Law, and all that unfunny crap. But don't worry about me. I'm sure a beer or two or five is all it'll take to have me feeling like a winner again. Plus I'm wearing great socks. They're so cool that a driver of a passing car actually rolled down his window and yelled "nice socks!" on my way back from the store earlier.

The Lost Episode

I've been taking a little rest from The Simpsons for the past few years. The old episodes are great, but years of daily syndication were starting to make them a little shopworn. And the ones from the past few years are just too painful to be borne.

Tonight, for the first time in a long time, I was in the mood for it. I pulled out an old tape, and my strategy paid off. It was great all over again. I even saw an episode I'd never seen before, which almost never happens. But then I realized maybe there was a reason for that. It was the Spinal Tap/Otto one, and sadly, it was pretty damn stupid. I was disappointed, but it did make me wonder if there's still a classic or two out there that I've never managed to catch.

What you don't want to see when you're already a little depressed:

A bunch of grackles eating a dead pigeon right next to your car while you're stuck at a light under a smelly freeway overpass.

Devils

When Eric was sick and parked on the couch the other night, he saw a special on Tasmanian devils.  I got home late that night. Since he'd been sick and I'd been working, there wasn't much else to talk about.

He started to tell me a little about them, their terrible habits and the horrible noise they make. He told me about the family on the show who had a nest of Tasmanian devils take up residence under their house but couldn't do anything about it because the devils are protected by law.

Eric was hoarse, and his diction was all strange from the fever, so it was a very dreamy and fantastic-sounding story. I loved it, so I kept asking for more details--tell me about the mating, and do the noise again, baby, do the noise they make--until his voice got weaker and weaker and he started to look sad and pinched. Eventually it was hard to tell if he was doing his Tasmanian devil impression or hoarsely imploring his insane bitch of a girlfriend to leave him alone and let him rest. So I quit, he went to bed, and I felt guilty and sad for a while.

Fortunately, I found a Tasmanian devil FAQ on the Tasmanian government site, and all was bright again.

It's a good FAQ, informative in nature and conversational in tone, and I learned a lot about Tasmanian devils.

For instance, the females give birth to about 30 young at a time but only have four nipples, so 26 babies are lost to Darwinism within hours. Also the adults eat wallabies. So yeah, it's worth a look, if you have the slightest bit of curiosity about the subject.

Grocery store

   
There's hardly anyone at the store at 2:30 a.m. on a Tuesday.

I was there, picking up cold medicine for Eric; Lyman was there, buying flowers and goodies for his wife; the paramedics were there, picking up a woman whose problems weren't immediately apparent but was at least conscious when they wheeled her out; the stockers were there, buying snacks on their lunch break (will someone tell the young men of the world they need more than Mountain Dew and Doritos to sustain them during their shifts?); and a tired cashier was there, ringing people up.

Except for running into Lyman, it was a pretty sad trip to the grocery store.

New view from my computer desk:

Yep, I have an officemate again. Joel has joined me on the night shift.

Now I can't fart very loudly or do weird stretching exercises in my office anymore, but I do have a true and faithful smoking buddy not six feet away from me at all times. So that's pretty cool.

Crap

Eric is sick. Evil, hacking, shivering-in-the-bed sick. That's simply no good at all.