Year: 2005

Monday, October 10th, 2005: Yesterday, woke up and we drove to Astoria for Jammie’s personal training. I got to sit around for an hour, watching her punch and sweat all over the place which was actually entertaining. Stopped by the house, then went to little India for some Indian food. Did some random shopping. I bought SHOES! Baconstrips will be proud of me, Spessa will not. I got Jammie to pick out a pair for me since I lack any fashion sense. (Well maybe I don’t lack it, I just don’t care.) We tried to visit a $5.00 psychic but she was closed for the day. Even though she had her door open and all the flashing lights on outside. We later tried to visit some other psychic but she was on vacation. Damn psychics are avoiding us.

Stopped by Blockbuster and rented a few movies. Came home and watched Crash which was excellent. Then we went on a walk. Which turned into a really long walk. Which eventually evolved into going to a bar for a couple of hours and playing darts. I’ve never played darts before so Jammie showed me how all the scoring works and I KICKED HER ASS. Well actually it was a very close game but I did manage to win, I’m sure by luck since I generally suck at everything. We each had 4 beers by the time we left but Jammie claims I had more like 5 of them because she kept switching our bottles to make me drink more. I only caught her at this once when I almost dropped a bottle, expecting it to be light when it was really heavy.

Stumbled around the corner to some restaurant. Had some really great waffles, bacon and eggs. I forget what Jammie had but I think fries were involved. Walked home which took about 20 – 30 minutes. I had some minor issues with walking and failed each time I tried to convince Jammie that I didn’t. Fell asleep soon after arriving home.

Today I plan to wander around the city, probably in search of a Barnes & Noble, while Jammie works for a half day.

8:18pm – Rode with Jammie to work, had breakfast with her at McDonald’s, then wandered around the city as planned. Got a little work done in the park at City Hall. Walked around Washington Square, visited random shops, found a book store and bought H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (I really want to read that since I saw the movie) and some biography of Adam & Eve by Mark Twain. I’m really into the Mark Twain thing lately.

After work we headed home and as we were walking from the train to Jammie’s car, we noticed a group of kids throwing things up into a tree to try and get their shoes, which were stuck near the top of the tree, down. We decided to sit on some steps across the street and watch the action. This lasted about 30 minutes as they threw every thing imgineable into the tree, trying to make the shoes fall down.

They were taking long 1×2 boards, found in some nearby trash and throwing them up into the tree and narrowly missing hitting each other everytime a board would fall to the ground. Then they started stacking wood up against the tree and climbing up it. They stood on the edge of a deck, throwing balls into the tree, then another kid would run into the road to retrieve the ball. I’ve never witnessed so many unsafe things happening all at once! At one point, they had 3 of their shoes stuck in the tree because they kept throwing shoes up to make other shoes fall. Eventually, after 30 minutes of us watching, they got them all down and we left.

Here’s a kid throwing a shoe at the shoe in the tree	Getting a few inches of air as he throws a board into the tree	Kicking a soccer ball into the tree
Standing on a homemade ladder, reaching for the shoe with a broom		Success finally! One kid picks up the last shoe while another cheers

Went home, then out to eat at some diner in Queens. Back home to watch Billy Madison, then to see a comedy show at a place called Upright Citizens Brigade around 11pm. Picked up a friend of Jammies, then met a few more of them at the show. I finally got to meet the infamous Antonio, a friend of Jammies who I hear a lot about. The show was completely free and we sure got what we paid for! I’ve seen plenty of amatuer standup and improv, but some of these people were awful. I did enjoy it though. Overall. They had a couple of pretty good standup acts. Some organizer of the show came out and actually bragged about being associated somehow with the Carrot Top movie Chairman of the Bored. And one of the acts involved 2 girls coming out and ranting on about charity in valley girl speak. That was, by far, the suckiest part of the suckage. But really, it was all pretty entertaining and we had fun. And Jammie managed to fit a nap into the whole thing.

Friday, October 7th, 2005: Last night I cleaned out the basement some more. It’s almost completely done now. Some neighbor kids helped me carry all the wood I had left over to Tom’s house. I took another full carload to storage, got some Tostitos for supper and came home. I might actually be able to leave this place by the end of the month.

I spent an hour last night looking through the Albany newspapers, real estate magazines and pamphlets that I picked up during Spring Break earlier this year. I found houses for sale there for just $10,000! I might get me one of those. I hope I can find another house to pointlessly renovate. I’ll probably end up in a trailer or manufactured home, though. I read the history of Albany too and it’s really boring there. I think I will hate it. I remember hating the people there the last time I lived there. Now I can hate their history too. You know when the hyped-up literature put out by the Albany visitors office makes it sound boring, it can’t be that interesting. Their biggest claim is that they have a lot of historical houses. The town is 150 years old so of course there’s going to be old houses there. Just like anywhere else in the country.

It’s named Albany because the founder (I think it was the founder) was from New York, whose capitol is Albany. So he exclaimed, “I can’t think up an original name of my own so I’ll steal Albany and nobody will ever know since it’s on the other side of the country!” At one point Indians changed the name to something else which translated into “hole in the ground” but the townspeople decided that wasn’t very flattering and settled on Albany again. I remember reading the history of Albany on the web once, and one of the highlights of their history being the construction of the movie theater. Another highlight was when Robert Wadlow, the tallest man in the world (who, incidentally, is from Alton), visited Albany. At least the literature from the visitors office leaves those boring tidbits out. I don’t know why I care about history so much, but it does matter to me.

It seems like nothing interesting actually ever happened in Albany during it’s 150 years. I’ve read 3 different versions of their history now and there’s just nothing there. Like in Alton we have man-eating monsters and it’s supposed to be one of the most haunted towns in America. Okay, maybe that just means we’re nuts. But we had Lovejoy, the slave rights journalist/activist who was killed by a mob here. We had the smallpox epidemic, Lincoln spent lots of time here and challenged some state guy to a dual with swords, Miles Davis, Robert Wadlow, neat caves, a one-of-a-kind bridge, indians killing children, ummm…okay I’m grasping for interesting things now. One thing that I remember about Albany is that there were absolutely no black people there. Just lots of burley white men with big belt buckles and moustaches. I kind of like the whole diversity thing. Maybe it’s a little different now, who knows.

Not that I’m determined to hate Albany or anything. It’s a nice little town, about the same size as Alton. When I was there earlier this year, I remember thinking that it was kind of nice and there were a lot of improvements from when I lived there 10 years ago. I just remember how much I disliked that place by the time I left it. I hope I’m happy there. I guess if it sucks too bad, I could just move to Portland.

I’m excited to get out of here though. It’s nice to have a good excuse to pack up and leave town forever. I’ve got a busy month ahead of me. Tomorrow I’m going to NYC. Then in 2 weeks Orlando. Then possibly the week after that Oregon.

Went to Bonnie’s today and we had lunch together. Ended up driving all the way to Edwardsville and ate at a place in downtown called Lauries. Was a 3 hour lunch, but it was fun. Went to Jamestown Mall this evening. I was going to go to 2600 but halfway there I changed my mind and decided I didn’t feel like being social. So I ended up at the mall, walked around, bought a book (Mark Twain biography) and bought a couple of really cheap shirts. In JC Penny I glanced at this old man with wild hair and a mustache. He had a packed shirt in his hands and he was biting down on it like a sandwich! I kept walking and he started telling me, quite loudly, how you have to do that to check something on them. He ranted until I was out of earshot. If I’d been in a better mood, I would have gone back and listened to his theories.

Went home and finished packing for my trip tomorrow.

---

Thursday, October 6th, 2005:

After spending the morning being bored enough to take pictures of myself having breakfast, I then became REALLY bored and read the manual to my phone system. (It’s convenient to blame my weirdness on boredom.) This caused me to actually activate it’s PBX-like features and set up a small voice menu. You can call and leave me messages at 618-465-1018 or 409-515-0555. Don’t expect a human to pick up – none of the extensions in the house actually ring.

Monday, October 3rd, 2005: What’s the difference between partly sunny and partly cloudy? Today’s weather report shows “Warmer and partly sunny. High around 90. South wind around 10 mph” but Tuesday night is “Partly cloudy. Low in the mid 60s. South wind around 10 mph.” I thought it might have something to do with day and night, but then Sunday’s forecast shows “Partly cloudy. High around 70” so that can’t be it. Is it just a glass is half empty/glass is half full type of thing?

Yesterday evening I was really bored and started working on some PHP stuff again, trying to customize my homepage journal a little more. I wanted to automate the updating process and have it update my RSS feed at the same time. I was painstakingly writing out this script, making sure that I had the ability to edit and delete and add pictures. I was making it so that it would look good on my Pocket PC and I’d be able to update from there. I did all of this same stuff just a few month earlier and it worked great. But it was all written in Perl and I changed to a webhost that only offered PHP so I mostly have to start over. Then I realized that this is all really stupid. Why don’t I just use LiveJournal, which already has all these cool features that I’m trying to build myself, and embed their code into my homepage. I suddenly don’t understand my strange desire to build everything myself. So that’s what I did – screw learning how to program. Here’s my LiveJournal.

So this is great! Now I have lots of extra free time since I won’t be so busy working on PHP scripts! I can use all this spare time to…

Dammit!

Sunday, October 2nd, 2005: A few weekends ago, Jammie and I were buying kool-aid from a couple of kids at a kool-aid stand in a driveway. And these shifty little salesmen-in-training give us this catalog of stuff to buy along with a sheet that lists the name, address and phone number of everyone else that’s bought things from them. We look it over while they’re slowly getting the kool-aid. To amuse Jammie, I went down the list and pointed out everyone I know. ‘I went to school with this girl, oh and there’s the mayor of East Alton – look what he bought!’ etc.

As we’re driving towards home, eating donuts and drinking kool-aid, I tell her the story about the time I tried to use the mayor of East Alton’s credit card number to illegally purchase a laptop computer. This was a little over a decade ago. Then we pass an insurance place and I see the mayor’s name, Fred Bright, as an insurance salesman. I suddenly realize I must be wrong about using the mayor’s credit card number. My story loses all credibility and I feel like such a liar. But today, while looking at wunderground.com for the local weather report, I see Fred Bright’s name again in an advertisement. I do a few Google searches and I find out that Fred actually is both the mayor and an insurance guy. So see, Jammie? I wasn’t making it all up after all!

Saturday, October 1st, 2005: On the subject of annoying Freecyclers, this girl arranges to come and get my couch today. It’s all done and arranged by email but I add my phone number on there in case she gets lost on the drive over. Even though I’ve given her very detailed driving directions in the email. She calls and and rehashes everything we talked about in the email. Then an hour later, some guy calls me (boyfriend? father?) to rehash everything that me and the girl talked about. He sits there and goes over the directions with me, step by step, while I confirm that yes, those are certainly the right directions. I’m really not as grouchy as I make this all sound and I am friendly with these phone calls and these people that show up unannounced. I love the concept of Freecycling and I like that people are coming to take stuff off my hands. It’s just annoying when people make it all difficult. Most of my Freecycling experiences really are positive.

Today I was at Lowes and, inspired by an article on Fark, decided to see if they had any handheld 10,000,000 candlepower flashlights. They didn’t and neither did Target. But They had 3,000,000 candlepower and under. I just wanted to buy one, see what trouble I could cause with it, and then return it. Then I saw a 1,000,000 candlepowere for just $9.99 so I just purchased that to keep. Might come in handy someday! I spent about 15 minutes, shining it in the neighbor’s window across the street. It was driving their dogs crazy. Finally he came out to see what was going on. I told him that from now on, I’m going to use the spotlight to get his attention instead of phone calls. That made the $9.99 worth it. This thing is super bright, too. The thought of increasing the power by 10 or 15 seems insane. And fun.

I really love Launchcast now. I’ve listened it off and on for the past year or so but never too heavily. I just didn’t think it was anything special. Then Jammie introduces me to a few of the basic features on it and now I’m hooked. I had no idea that it could do so much. Launchcast blows XM & Sirius away. And Winamp, Windows Media, FM, AM and mp3s. Screw everything else! There’s absolutely nothing that can do what Launchcast can do. The rating system is brilliant and I love that it can randomly play songs from other peoples’ Launchcast favorites. Yeah yeah, I know this is all obvious stuff to vetran Launchcast listeners. I’m just excited by both the new music I’m suddenly being exposed to as well as the old stuff that I haven’t heard in years, all in my own personal mix of genres. I signed up for a year of Launchcast yesterday, which I think was just $2.99 per month. Beats the $60 per month I was paying the cable company to mostly just listen to their digital music channels. Jammie kept making fun of me for that. Anyway, everyone go listen to Launchcast immediately. It’s great even if you’re not a subscriber.

Oh yeah, I took my cable box back to the cable company yesterday and canceled service. I’m now paying a mere $25/month for my cable internet, instead of the $85 I was paying before. Which I guess hardly matters since I’ll probably be leaving this place in a month anyway. I’ll miss the movie channels a little, but I can still download the good stuff from Bittorrent. The line in the cable office was terrible. There were 3 people helping customers, but one line. I stood there for about 15 minutes before it finally being my turn. About 7 people come in and get behind me while I’m in line. Then while I’m at the counter getting the service shut off, this lady comes in and tries to cut in front of all of these people by saying that there are 3 lines. Everyone protests, even the employees. She argues a bunch and eventually loses. But it was a fun battle to watch. It looked like she was defeated at one point and she went to the back of the line, then she came back up and exclaims, “There are 3 people at the counter! There must be 3 lines here!” A little more arguing and then she gave up again. Not sure if she went for round 3 after I left or not.

The other semi-amusing thing happening at the cable company was this guy there, trying to downgrade his cable package to save money. But at the same time he was wanting to trade in his current cable box for a cable box that had built-in DVR, which would cost him an extra $9.99 per month. I mean, if you’re trying to save a little money on your monthly bill, wouldn’t it make sense to just learn how to program your VCR to record your shows? VHS tapes are cheap! I should just hang out at the cable office all day. It seems fun there. It was like watching one of those wacky reality TV shows!