Some October 2003 Entries
Monday, 10-6-2003: Worked all day, no kids. Tricia came over around 6pm and we hung out for awhile, then went to Piasa Pantry to buy lotto tickets and food. The first lotto tickets I’ve ever actually purchased! Came back home to eat and watch Galaxy Quest.
Tuesday, 10-7-2003: Worked, picked up the kids from school. At 5pm, we all went and picked up Tricia and Jordyn and went to eat at the Fin Inn.
Wednesday, 10-8-2003: Worked, picked up the kids, Colleen picked them up from here at 5:30pm. Tricia came over for awhile. We went to Target to try and find some new sandals for me but they didn’t have any. Bought the animated Clerks DVD instead. After she left I cleaned up the apartment next door a little. Got all the pieces of wall picked up and put out in the trash.
Thursday, 10-9-2003: Lately I’ve been promoting sections of phonelosers.org on TotalFark. I stick a link on there it doesn’t get listed for regular visitors but it does for the TotalFark visitors. Farkers rarely make any comments about the link but I usually end up with over 100 hits from it each time I do that. So I do it again today, only I link the Farkers to a CGI script on cal.phonelosers.org. Unexpectedly, Fark approves this link without me noticing and all hell breaks loose. EvilCal calls me up, just a little ticked off about it because it’s crashing the Cal server since so many people are running the CGI all at once. It wouldn’t have been a problem if Fark would have ignored me like they usually do. Whoops.
So my week’s been fairly normal. I’ve worked, I’ve ate things and I’ve hung out with the kids a lot. That’s about it. I’ve been working on RijilV’s old apartment next door, fixing the walls and electrical stuff so I can move new tenants in since I’m poor and need the rental money. My original plan with that place was to turn his apartment into 2 or 3 more bedrooms and get a few room mates. Either that or start up the PLA Motel. I could rent out each room for $75 per week. But for now I’ll just stick with the renting out the whole thing for $350 per month. At least I’ll maintain my privacy this way. I found a cool quote on imdb.com the other day:
“I did go to school – my kind of school. When I was a kid I went out… and you meet people. You talk to them. Anybody says something that makes sense, it stays with you, rubs off on you. That kind of school.” – George Burns
George Burnes dropped out of school in the 4th grade. It makes a lot of sense, I don’t remember learning anything useful in school since about the 6th grade or so. Junior High and High School was a huge joke. To me anyway, I’m sure plenty of people actually get something out of it all but not me. I look back on high school as 4 years completely wasted. Maybe I’ll be able to give my kids other options when they’re ready for high school. If they want other options. I feel like I’ve learned a whole lot more since dropping out of high school and experiencing life than I ever did in school. If I could do it all over again, I would have dropped out of school 2 years sooner. Then again, I’m an idiot. But a happy idiot. I’ll stop trying to make sense now, it’s just not working.
Friday, 10-10-2003: Tricia came over in the evening and we watched Falling Down.
Saturday, 10-11-2003: Called Bonnie around 9:30am and asked if she wanted me to keep Christian for the day. She brings him over immediately and I keep him all day and for the night. We don’t really do anything interesting all day, we just kind of hang around the house. Tricia and Jordyn came over in the afternoon for a few hours. Me and Tricia did a little work on patching walls in the apartment.
Sunday, 10-12-2003: I decided to keep Christian (a 2-year-old) for the weekend. It was fun, all except for the sleeping part. He’s not a good sleeper and then he gets up at 5:00am for the day. On a Sunday. So we get up and I half-sleep on the couch while he runs around the house and watches TV, occasionally getting up to give him some sort of food that will keep him quiet. The first thing he did when we got downstairs was go to the door and say, “Let’s go outside!” I had to open the blinds and show him that it’s still dark out. Quite a change from the way I woke up exactly one week ago. So I’ve been a zombie today. Just kind of sat around as every kid in the neighborhood ran through my house all day. Christian is gone, tomorrow I sleep in.
Monday, 10-13-2003: Had a boring average day. The kids stayed home from school for some holiday that I don’t know or care about. Apparently some guy did something years and years ago that I’m supposed to care about. But I don’t. It’s annoying how many Mondays we get off for holidays. Can’t they just combine all the holidays into one single Monday per year? The most annoying one is the holiday for that polish guy. I can’t spell or pronounce his name and I don’t know what he did but I wish he hadn’t done it because it’s just another Monday where everything is closed for no good reason.
Tonight, after I got the kids in bed, I started going through sections of phonelosers.org and updating random things that I thought should be updated. I did some work on the Red Boxing for Dummies page and added a section on things to do with your useless red box. Then I did something I hadn’t ever planned on – I released my book project on the web. I’ve been wanting to write a book for a couple of decades now and occasionally I’ll be bored enough to actually work on it. I realize that I’m a terrible writer and even if I get a book published, very few people will read it. But it’s just something I’ve always wanted to do. So here’s the first couple of chapters. In a few days I’ll probably wish I hadn’t stuck it on the web and I’ll take it down. But it’s there for now. I’m hoping that having the story online will motivate me to put a little more effort into finishing it.
Other blogs let their users rant about what music they’re currently listening to but my pretend blog here doesn’t have little “now playing” icons. I’m not listening to anything right now. It’s completely quiet in here except for the rain pounding on my air conditioner. But I’ve had a song stuck in my head for days now – Stacey’s Mom by Fountains of Wayne. For some reason, I love that song. It sounds so 80’s and the video is equally corny, but it’s a great song. To me, anyway. Everyone else I know can’t stand it or has never heard of it. Go to Kazaa and download it. And watch the video too, you get to see Stacey’s mom poledance in the living room.
Tuesday, 10-14-2003: Got up, took the kids to school, worked a bunch, then quit and worked on the apartment next door all evening. It’s almost done, just a little painting to do. I locked myself out of the house today when I left to go to Lowes and realized I forgot my keys. I spent about 10 minutes walking around the house, looking to see if any windows were unlocked so that I could climb in. None of them were. I used to keep a spare key hidden in the back but I stopped doing that. Finally I remembered leaving an upstairs window unlocked from the night before. So I drug out a ladder and climbed in. Some neighbors were watching me, they probably thought it was weird to see a guy wearing an FBI jacket climbing into a 2nd story window. But I got in and got my keys. Boy howdy, was that exciting for me.
Wednesday, 10-15-2003: So today…I was woke up at 9:00am by the doorbell. That sucked because I was sleeping fairly good. Hmmm. I did some other stuff throughout the day. I think my day was probably exactly like yesterday except I didn’t get locked out of the house. And I went to the grocery store and bought some STAX!
I got on Kazaa earlier today to download the new Black Eyed Peas song after I heard it on the radio. A few minutes later I’m listening to the mp3. But about 10 seconds into it, I hear this horrid noise throughout the rest of the song. Dammit, it’s the record companies releasing fakes again. No big deal, I can respect that. So I download it again from a different person. Same thing. So I download yet another copy. This one loops the “where is the love” chorus over and over and over. Okay, this is war. I click on about 100 different copies of that same song. About 15 minutes later after I’ve got most of them, I start sampling them all. They’re all fakes. Then after listening to about 50 of them, I finally find a real one. So all that sucked, but it sure beat going out and paying $12.99 for a CD of one good song.
Later in the day I went through the exact same thing with a new Obie Trice song. The only difference is that after downloading 20 or 30 different copies of the song, I still didn’t find a real version of that. Reminds me of last summer when The Eminem Show was released. I spent a lot of time downloading all the tracks from the CD, finding out they were fakes, then downloading new ones that said “REAL VERSION!” on them, finding out they were fakes, etc. I finally gave up on it. Last week (like 4 months later) I tried again and successfully downloaded the entire Eminem Show CD. It’s a pain in the ass. But I think that’s a very cool way for the record companies to combat illegal file sharing. It makes so much more sense than going around, filing pointless lawsuits against 12-year-olds. The thing is, if they would just set up a web site where I could download the entire Eminem CD for $5.00, I would most likely do that rather than waste my time listening to fake tracks. The RIAA needs to give up on stopping mp3s. It’s never gonna happen. It’d be like them trying to stop me from copying songs off the radio onto cassette tapes back in the 80’s. Impossible. I haven’t bought a CD since 2001, thanks to my cable modem and file sharing. Screw you, RIAA. And screw you too, Artists, I’m too lazy and broke to buy music.
Saturday, 10-18-2003: I spent the entire day cleaning my house. I completely emptied out my daughter’s room (like all the furniture and everything), shampooed the carpet, put in a ceiling light for her and made it work with a real light switch in the wall so we can stop using this x10 nonsense in there, then put everything back in her room. I also moved my old entertainment center down from upstairs and gave her my old big TV to stick in it. So anyway, it’s probably cleaner in there than it’s been in the past 5 years or so. Then I did the exact same thing in my son’s room, minus the electrical work. All of that took pretty much all day. The old bookshelf that I ripped out of the wall to get to RijilV’s apartment a few months ago (detailed here) – I made that about 16 inches shorter and installed it into a different wall opening, then got all my books organized onto it. (here’s pictures) Between all that, I cooked 3 meals today for me and the kids, and baked a few sheets of cookies. I think I went for about 14 hours without sitting. I ache. But I’ll sleep good tonight.