Oh, my stars and garters!

Another amazing moving find

I don't know why I kept this, but look! It's a Billy Beer can! I found it in a carton of other old beer cans outside the office of the Texas Observer about five years ago and took it home because I thought it was funny. I don't know why they kept it either.

(Please excuse the blurry, weirdly lit picture. I didn't feel like taking the time to take another, even though I realize now that would have taken a lot less time than typing this needless apology. Hey, did I mention that I'm moving?)

Can you see the faint lipstick stain on the rim? Even the sexiest women drank Billy Beer!

A packing tip from Joolie and Eric:

Stay very slightly crocked the entire time. One beer every hour and a half should do it.  Any less and you will hate your life; any more and you will start dropping things. Best of all, maintaining about 0.05 percent BAC makes you that much more ruthless when it comes time to clear out your kitchen cabinets. Nobody needs four coffee pots when they only have one coffee maker. Nor do they need two juicers, an Altoids tin full of carpet tacks, or a hammer that has a head that tilts five degrees away from the handle.

Also, we have learned that placing gently used but unwanted items onto the Goodwill pile is a nice thing thing to do, but it is not nearly as cathartic as violently hurling them into the trash can. Die, ugly juice cups that I have for some reason been looking at for the past decade even though I never liked them or used them, die!

Neither quantity nor quality

I just learned that we will be without internet, phone, and cable at the new house for up to two weeks because the doofoids who are moving out of there haven't cancelled their service yet, and we can't start a new account at that address until they do so. Then it will take a week and half for them to get in there. Jesus, I hate Time Warner. I wish Grande were on that block.

This is not a problem on the level of, say, having your house bombed, but I'm pretty cranky about having to wait that long. Cable I can grudgingly live without, and I have internet at work, and we can use my cell phone in the meantime, but I don't see why it takes that long for them to come out and flip the switch on something the house is already wired for.

Oh, wait, I do see! I see that Time Warner sucks eggs! I hope their merger drags them down like a barnacle-encrusted anchor until they drown and are devoured by an army of Pinprick's disapproving kraken.

On a happier note, Dan and Choo came over last night to distract me from my packing. They did such a good job of distracting me that Choo passed out on the couch and didn't leave here until about an hour ago. Of course, her productivity this morning as she meticulously wrapped and packed all the framed pictures in the house totally cancelled out the distraction part, but I won't hold that against her.

Two topics you will never tire of hearing about: Moving and cats.

I wish I had something to talk about other than moving. I mean, we've lived together in this house for a long time and all, but it's really not that big a deal. People move all the time. I myself used to move every few months, and then every few years. We're just going a few streets over, not to Reykjavik.

But I'm freaked out. Wain's freaked out. The cats are freaked out. Eric's freaked out.

Eric, I can understand. He has a lot of stuff. This is only a tiny fraction of the disarray he has to deal with, and this isn't even that great of an illustration. Mostly I just liked the stuffed octopus, blankly sitting above this big scramble of stuff 'n' things 'n' shit.

I knew this was around here somewhere.

I am finding some amazing things as I sift through my stuff in preparation for packing, and I feel compelled to repeatedly embarrass myself with them.

This is simultaneously the best and worst picture ever taken of me. This picture kicks the Tom Thumb uniform picture's ass up and down the block, then drives a heel into its throat and nudges it contemptuously into the gutter.

Shaved head, 7-Eleven smock, doofy grin, posing with the store's Budweiser delivery guy who looked uncannily like, but in fact was not,* the Bud Guy in the ad campaign (pictured in the cardboard cutout behind us).  All captured on Polaroid. This is a confluence of...something. I don't know what exactly. But it's definitely really something.

*Or maybe it is the Bud Guy? Eric swears it is. I know the actual Bud Guy came to the store, but I thought I posed later with the lookalike delivery guy because the actual Bud Guy was incredibly annoying. But Eric remembers me calling to tell him about it, and he also points out that the dude in the photo has a nametag that says "Gus." So perhaps my memory is faulty. I suggest you believe nothing I say until we get to the bottom of this.

Bouncy castle attack

It's sad that two people died in the mishap, but I must admit I laughed pretty hard when I saw video of a giant multicolored inflatable sculpture flying through the air and into a screaming crowd on BBC News this afternoon. The anchorman likened the sculpture to a "bouncy castle," the British term for a moonwalk. Bouncy castle sounds much nicer. Unless, of course, it happens to be floating around murdering fairgoers.

Thumbs up for shit jobs!

Click the photo for the full story...

Dollar bin

I am only posting this to put off packing up my closet for another 30 seconds. It's really bad in there. Eight years' worth of loose and miscased CDs, cassette tapes (cassingles!), gifts I don't want but can't throw away, all my college notebooks, the misery box, and on and on and on. I don't wanna. Won't somebody come over and distract me so I'll have an excuse to postpone this for another few days?

Loop

Moving moving moving beer moving swimming moving swimming beer work work work moving work.

We're having people over at the old house one last time this weekend before we wipe the layer of grime off everything and start putting it all in boxes. The number one question from invitees has not been the usual, much-appreciated "How much premium-quality beer should I bring?" or "What time do you think should the highly skilled burlesque dancers I plan on hiring arrive?"

No, this time, all I hear is, "Oh, boy, do we get to wreck the place?!?" I know they're just joking, but everyone's eyes gleam just a leetle too much for my taste when they ask me that. I mean, I'd kind of hoped to live there another week and a half and then get at least some of the deposit back.

Don't forget!

Tomorrow is World Jump Day. I don't think I'll be getting up at 5:30 a.m. to participate, but you might like to. Sproing!

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign

I guess the butterfly kicked everyone's ass yesterday, not just mine, because only half of our swimming class showed up tonight. We swam half-heartedly for a few minutes, then gave up and basically spent the rest of the class doing cannonballs off the diving board. The instructor showed us how to spring off the board and get more air on the launch.

Fine with me. I was wiped out after spending the afternoon at the lake anyway. And then what little energy I had left was sapped by the lease-signing process this evening.

This is our lease packet.

Is this normal? All my other lease agreements have consisted of either one page or getting a future roommate to ask the dude who owns the house if it's cool if I move in.

Yeah, this one was a little more involved than that. It took us nearly an hour in a sunny, unairconditioned room to complete the deceptively simple-sounding task of "signing the lease." I refuse to sign my name that many times again until I'm finalizing a damn mortgage.

Anyway, we signed and signed, and initialed and signed some more. We signed addenda: asbestos, mold, and lead hazards; smoke detectors; pets; and, my favorite, air conditioner maintenance and ant control.

Let it not be said that the process was without entertainment. Keep in mind this lurid non sequitur is part of a legally binding document:

Remember, renters, only you can prevent an ant Jonestown, so keep your filters clean and stock up on Amdro! Move-in's the first; keep the lawn trimmed and feel free to paint. 

And so the caterpillar broke free of its cocoon, only to realize it was doomed to remain a caterpillar for all time. The end!

It turns out I stink at butterfly.

I'd harbored this fantasy that once I'd learned it, I would immediately be great at it. Like astonishingly great, but I just never knew how good I was before because I'd never tried it. But, see, my ability was there all along, coiled tightly within, waiting to spring forth and blossom at the slightest hint of an attempt.

My new pen

Click here for my conflicted feelings about it.

Malaizy

Well, we were finally deemed worthy to live in the last house we looked at, so that's the one we'll be renting.

I guess I should start packing, but I've been sad, achy, and tired all weekend. Besides, I'd like to put off the general disarray of moving as long as possible. When I look around, I don't really have that much stuff anyway. Collector Boy, on the other hand, is completely fucked.

Enough whining. Jeez. Look at the new handlebar grips I got today. Very cheerful, no? And bold.

Cheerful and bold, that's me.

Oh, if you are like me in that not only are you cheerful and bold but you also like Joan Didion a lot but have always had some problems with her writing that you couldn't really articulate because: 1) you're intellectually lazy; and 2) you weren't even alive at the time she was writing about most of these issues so what the hell do you know as compared to the likes of, say, Joan Didion, you might like to read this Barbara Grizzuti Harrison (never heard of her before) essay from 1979.

Some of it struck me as just picking nits to bolster a larger argument, but some of it is dead on. Some of it is just really funny. If you've been looking for a 27-year-old, 8,000 word essay critical of Joan Didion's style and politics (and, gosh, who hasn't?), this is totally for you.

If that doesn't sound too good, my friend Margaret was able to sum it up much more succinctly, saying something to the effect that she likes Joan Didion but she sometimes wishes her female characters would just snap out of it and stop obsessively driving the fucking freeway or whatever already.

Ok, that takes care of Joan Didion, once and for all. Now I have to go watch this week's rerun of The Wire, which is one thing I still can't find much wrong with.

All alone by the cellular phone

Dan is up in Rochester right now, and he and Vickie are hanging out as I type. They are going to play around with photos and go out to eat delicious food for dinner. I'm excited about this, despite the fact I'm so jealous I could spit: Ptooey! My friends should never be allowed to have fun without me. Got it, guys? Ok, good.

I have a good breaststroke.

Case, our cute teenaged swimming instructor said so, and I'm sure he wouldn't lie to me. Poor kid. His combined youth and cuteness give Jennifer and me the giggles, and I think it's starting to make him paranoid.

Case showed me how to make my stroke more efficient tonight, and that was worth the price of the whole class alone. Plus last night we got to go off the diving board. He said he'd teach us to do the walking jump thing off the board so we could try doing flips tonight, but he either forgot or didn't want to pull out the lifeguard gear he's required to have on hand for such death-defying feats.

 

                                                                                          (File photo!)

Swim class is pretty fun.  I think I should take more classes in general. I feel like I'm finally over my post-college aversion to them.

(Weird. It looks like Typepad dropped my previous post. This has never happened before.)

(Ok, it's fixed. If you're on Typepad and lost a post today, you can recover it by following the steps outlined here.)

(Oh, good lord. I misspelled "breaststroke." That's fixed now too. This blog is turning into a disaster area.)

Jake brake me to sleep, baby.

We put in an application for a place a few blocks from where we live now. There are some drawbacks, like the fact that it's three doors down from the freeway. And it's true that the broken auto glass at the curb didn't seem like the best omen, especially after we went to the police report database and confirmed there had been a car break-in a few weeks ago.

On the other hand, I know people whose cars have been broken into in all sorts of neighborhoods, and I've lived that close to the interstate before. Only at the time I could also see and hear the airport from the front yard. We lived so close to the airport I could see the passengers' faces in the windows at night as the planes flew over our house. I could rarely complete a telephone conversation without interruption and often missed major plot points in movies when 30 full seconds of dialogue were blasted out by the roaring jet engines and rattling windows. Always with the I know who killed your father... RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRWHEEEEEEEEEE
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
...and so the mystery is solved! (Roll credits.)

This place can't possibly be as weird and noisy as that one. Plus lots of tile, big kitchen with counter space, storage, carport, front porch, dishwasher, landlady who doesn't care what we do or don't do to the place, blah blah blah. Blah.

Hey, I'm bored with this! Aren't you? We jumped on this place so we could stop thinking about it and get on with our lives, so I'm going to do just that. Bye!

Stroke out

My first swimming lesson today kicked my ass. Which is weird because I thought I was all Miss Swimmy. But we're starting with the freestyle. I never do the freestyle because I suspected, correctly, that I was doing it all wrong. This will change. Also we're going to learn diving and flip turns and maybe even the butterfly. Soon I'll be able to go swimming in the lap lanes at Deep Eddy with all the Super Serious Swimmers and not feel like a lane-clogging loser.

I'm tired. Work went long today, and the house hunt continues. The cute little house turned out to be littler than it was cute, and it was pretty damn cute. We knew it would be small, but maybe not so small that you can only squeeze a half-fridge in the kitchen. If we lived there we would almost certainly starve to death, because there would be no room for food. See, we need that much fridge space just for beer and Topo Chico. And we certainly don't want to starve to death; it would be a real shame to stink up that nice lady's 1930s cottage with our rotting corpses. We'll just keep looking.

Why haven't I moved in eight years?

Oh, that's right. It's because I fucking hate moving.

I am unique in this, I'm sure. Most people adore moving, right? They absolutely love it! But not me, my friends, not me.

See, what you people need to understand is that I am like a snowflake, or perhaps a distant star, in that I am among many but still so very different and alone. My needs and wants are not like anyone else's. I am delicate, touched deeply by things no one else will ever even perceive; I live off peach nectar, fairy piss, and the morning dew; furthermore, nobody knows the troubles I've seen, nobody knows my sorrow. Etc.

But seriously, I really don't like moving.

We drove around for a few hours today, taking down numbers at shitbox after weedy shitbox. We saw a few houses that would be just fine, but nothing really stood out. We're out of the current place in three weeks, and still it seems a little too early to seriously start making calls anyway.

But! We have an appointment tomorrow to see a small but cute, cheap, and conveniently located house. Let's hope it works out so I can start writing about something more compelling, like how much I hate to pack.

Whee! Glub! Whee!

I spent all day day yesterday on St. Murse's roommate's boat. She was a great hostess and seemed to take real pleasure from driving carefully around the lake, patiently helping everyone else get up on the skis. And then when we put away the ski equipment and broke out the tubes, she got to reveal her sadistic side, grinning wildly as she drove around in tight, fast circles, watching her passengers hold on for dear life as they flew around and wiped out spectacularly. I think everyone on the boat ended up with their shorts around their ankles at least once during that portion of the afternoon.

John thought it was hilarious that we were all having so much fun engaging in activities that basically boil down to being dragged around by a rope all day, himself included.

I shocked myself by getting up on the skis on my first try; I haven't waterskiied since eighth or ninth grade. And then I shocked myself again by wakeboarding for the first time, at least for a few seconds. Nothing spectacular; I couldn't even get back over the wake, but I did get up and stay up, long enough to feel a little bit like a jock. My triumph was diluted somewhat when I couldn't get up on the kneeboard, but my limbs were feeling awfully noodlelike by then. I'm a little sore today, but not as much as I'd expected. Maybe I'm in better shape than I thought I was, or maybe it was the painkiller I took before I went to bed last night. Either way, I feel fine.

New MacBook

Click it and it'll get bigger. The 13 or so minutes it took to do this swept by like wildfire!

A question

Not bitter yet

The rental listings on Craigslist are blowing my mind.

Do stained concrete floors, "impressive ceilings," and a downtown location really make it okay that you're paying $1,300 for a one-bedroom apartment anywhere in frigging Texas? But really, that's nothing. How about renting a loft for $1,770? I dunno, that sounds like a pretty wise investment to me.

Does the phrase "SEX IN THE CITY" actually make people want to live in a glorified efficiency? Because you know that dragging your sloppy-drunk ass (and trying to coax your cat, who probably hates you) up a spiral staircase to sleep in the mezzanine every night will make you and Carrie Bradshaw, like, twins!

(By the way, why is it that every single new apartment complex seems to be painted that subtle-enough-to-be-tasteful-but-already-outdated olive green/mustard yellow/brick red color scheme? Is this a new zoning law or something?)

Finally, is it really necessary to specify that UT students are welcome when you're trying to rent out a seven-bedroom house for $4,200? Who the hell else are you going to get to move in?

I love it here, but give me a break. Austin's not that goddamn great, at least not at these prices.

I know there are still reasonable deals out there. I think we're going to have to do this the old-fashioned way and spend all day Sunday driving around, calling numbers off signs, and trying to sweet-talk people into doing whatever it takes to accomodate us, our raggedy cats, and our increasingly heavy-looking washer and dryer.

How to become the most boring person in the world:

Get up. Go to work. Come home. Pay the bills. Go to the grocery store. Delete unneeded files from your computer's hard drive. Post about all these things. Go to bed.

I forgot why it's not a good idea to spend most of the day drinking cheap beer.

Also I forgot why I don't sit around all the time eating hot dogs, tater tots, and Twinkies. But I sure remember now!

Quit shoving

I made $50 off the yard sale and dumped the rest off at Goodwill. It was pretty fun sitting around in the shade, drinking coffee and talking to strangers. The Serious Yard Sale People freaked me out, though. Those people were way too excited. I distrust people who are that intense and vigorous at eight a.m. on a Saturday, especially when what's driving them is the heady possibility of scoring cheap glassware. I was told I'd actually missed the worst of it because I overslept and was two minutes late. T minus 15 minutes was apparently a madhouse.

Today was lazy day, sort of. I don't think I had a lazy day in the entire month of June, so I felt entitled. Laundry, sushi, tv, bathing-suit browsing, that sort of thing.

It looks like boy-short bottoms are out this year in favor of those stupid bikini/skirt combinations. I have to find some boy shorts, though, even if it means being a poolside fashion don't. I'm taking swimming lessons starting July 10; four days a week for two weeks. I cannot possibly be expected to shave that often. In fact, I refuse. I'm sure I'll find something if I venture beyond Academy and Target. Or maybe I'll just buy a swimsuit here. Then I won't have to shave my armpits either.

Blah, blah, blah. I'm really just killing time by writing this right now while waiting for my Rochester pictures to upload to flickr. I think they're done. Yep. You can see them here. There were lots of great old buildings and signs around, but I didn't really have time to get any of those. Next visit, I guess.

"Cholesterol free" ain't necessarily something to brag about.

I bought this in Rochester. Actually, I bought two: one for Wain and one for Roo. It's the most disgusting candy I have ever seen.

No, seriously, it is. They have those fairly realistic-looking chocolate roaches, but that's way too easy. Roaches are inherently gross; any asshole can make a roach-shaped pretty much anything for a cheap, um, gag.

No, the junior cheeseburger made entirely of colored marshmallow gunk (with tiny candy sesame seeds) wins the prize for grody, hands down.

The most fucked-up thing? The nutritional information on the back counts this monstrosity as one serving. Nuh-uh. No way. Not unless they quietly changed the allowance timeframe from "daily" to "lifetime and beyond."