Category: Uncategorized

Nov. 19th, 2005|09:00 am: I think I hurt this fly’s feelings. Or maybe I humbled him. Ever since I moved into this place, these two flies have been driving me crazy. I’ve said, “Goddammit!” a lot these past couple days because these flies keep landing on me and buzzing around my head while I’m trying to do things. So a few minutes ago, I pick up a LIFE magazine, swing at the fly and hit him really hard as he’s flying in the air. I don’t see him after that so I sit back down and get back to my mindless boring internet stuff.

Suddenly he’s back, but he’s staying away from me. He’s flying around and landing on walls and stuff but he refuses to come near me. I wonder if this particular fly is capable of reason and has figured out that I’m a bad motherfucker and he should keep his distance. It’s like he’s lost some of his spunk. I hope he tells the other fly to stay away from me too. There’s just two flies in this house, I think. I wish they’d hurry up and die so I don’t have to invest in a fly swatter.

I’m not sure how long flies live, but he was probably a really happy-go-lucky kind of fly and never suspected that there were bad things in the world until he received that beatdown from my LIFE magazine. I’ve probably ruined his whole outlook on life. If I haven’t given him brain damage, he’s probably just depressed now. He’s at the window right now, probably wanting to get out of here.

Anyway, on to more important things…I have to find a laundromat today. And I desperately need some breakfast since I haven’t eaten anything since breakfast yesterday. I might visit a few yard sales and see if there’s any furniture I can use. And I need to fix the phone jacks in this house – there’s a jack in every room but only the living room one works.

Nov. 19th, 2005|08:28 am: Cellular phone designers need to make surveillance camera software for your cell phone. Most cell phones already have a camera and plenty of storage. So why can’t they keep an eye on things while you’re away? It’d be a simple piece of software. All it needs to do it snap a picture at an interval that you decide on, based on how much memory is available in your phone. Or if you have a lot of memory (mine is capable of taking a 1 gig mini SD card) it could take video. Or if you don’t have a lot of storage, the phone could automatically upload the pictures to the internet. They could even make the software detect motion and instruct it only to snap pictures when motion is detected. This could be used for all kinds of things, such as…

• When you’re stay at a hotel and leave your room for the day, you could set the phone inconspicuously someplace to keep an eye on the maid to make sure she isn’t stealing everything in sight. Which would work great as long as she didn’t steal the phone.

• Nannycam! Watch the babysitter beat your kids while you’re out.

• Attention whores could wear their cell phone on a lanyard around their neck and have it take pictures of what they’re doing all day. One picture per minute could show up in their Livejournals. This could be the newest blogging fad! Even if you didn’t broadcast the pictures, it might be interesting to have nonstop photographic archives of your entire days. Especially if you’re actually doing anything interesting.

• Party Phonecast! You’re a hip teenager throwing a party. You invite everyone on your Buddy List to the party and everyone is having a great time, discoing and drinking Kool-aid. You should show all the losers who couldn’t make it what they’re missing out on by broadcasting the party to a website. They will be envious and they’ll eventually break down and come to your party too. And in the end you’ll be the most popular guy in school and a cheerleader will be your girlfriend! Plus you’ve got a nice little archive of this historic party to keep forever. Sure, you could do the same thing with Yahoo and a webcam. But that’s tethered to a desk somewhere. A cell phone broadcast can be done from anywhere, indoors or out.

I think that even if the cellular companies have already thought of this, they worry that using a cell phone as a surveillance camera would mean that the cell phone is left behind too often, meaning that it won’t be used for things that they can charge you for. If it’s sitting in your hotel room snapping pictures, then you’re not using up all your minutes. Unless they could charge for it. Like 1 cent per picture, 1 picture per minute, that’s 60 cents an hour to keep an eye on something while you’re away. Except Verizon Wireless would charge more like a gazillion dollars for it.

Nov. 18th, 2005|11:12 pm: Took the kids to McDonald’s for breakfast this morning. I really need to get some groceries in the house next so we can stop going out to eat so often. I went by Staples and got a couple 5′ tables. A brown one for my office and a white one for the kids’ Legos. Also a bulletin board and a couple office trash cans and some envelopes. I love office supplies. It’s an addiction for me, going to an office supply store and just browsing the isles for hours. My house is completely empty, but I sure have a furnished office here! When I got busted for shoplifting at Walgreens in my Freshman year of high school, you know what I was stealing? Yep, office supplies.

I also got a bed today! See, I was going to buy some used matresses from the newspaper and beg the people to deliver them for me since I didn’t have a truck. I’ve bought matresses from the paper before and I’ve taken used beds from people before. I never really saw an issue with that. But at some point, I mentioned this to Spessa, and I get a couple of emails from her that grossed me out enough to convince me to just go to a bed store and buy them new. Here’s some parts of the emails…

Are you going to get one of those used beds with other people’s dust mites, mentrustation stains, and fecal flakes embedded within? Those are the best!

Maybe you can get a whiskey smelling bed from a more dedicated drinker? Or one from a methamphetamine cook who spilled all kinds of toxic chemicals all over the bed. Oh wait, those kinds of people don’t fall asleep, do they?

I try to be a really responsible bed owner, e.g. flip it over every six months and vacuum the mites out on a regular basis. I even Febreezed it a few weeks ago, after the most recent beer spilling incident. But I still wouldn’t want to buy it from someone else.

Whenever someone donates a bed to goodwill or sells it via the classified ads, it’s usually because someone has peed or pooed on it on it.

Why else would anyone get rid of a perfectly good bed?

Just imagine the inside springs encursted with what was once liquid feces and/or crystilized urine flakes!

Or perhaps an entire colony of scabies or crabs live within; like ten kajillion maggots hollowing out the insides of a rotting corpse.

The mites themselves (Which all used mattresses have) don’t really bother you, but it’s rather the mite poop that people get all allergic to and stuff. So _BEST_ case scenario, your new used bed will just be chock full of mite shit, which as we all know from watching the Discovery channel is composed of other people’s nasty skin flakes.

So go buy a brand new bad wrapped in plastic and then take a picture of it for us, so we can see just how influential we are!

PS: We’ll never forgive you for making us sleep on that urine encrusted bed at your old house, damn you for not buying us a brand new tempurpedic mattress, made from the highest quality space age materials and invented by NASA.

So I went to The Sleep Center and purchased two shiney new mattresses. The cheapest they had, almost. They were able to deliver them to my house just a couple of hours later. My nights of sleeping on the living room floor are over. Now I just have to get some beds for the kids.

This evening I went to Home Depot and got some stuff to fix my phone jacks and some shelves for the office. Yes, more office stuff. I got the kind of shelves where you mount brackets to the wall, then you can adjust the shelves whenever you need to. I got them mounted already and they kick ass.

Nov. 17th, 2005|09:54 pm: My girlfriend just got accepted into NYU. She’s a smarter person than I. (Notice how I said “I” instead of “me” just to appear a little smarter?

Congrats, Jammie!

Nov. 17th, 2005|08:44 am: There’s nothing more spiritually enlightening than putting together new office furniture. Or any furniture for that matter. I think buying and shopping for office supplies comes in at a close 2nd. But nothing compares to the thrill of putting together cheap pressboard furniture, which I’ve been doing somewhat regularly since about age 16 when I bought my first entertainment center at Wal-Mart.

Yesterday I officially moved into my new house. I went to the thift store in hopes of finding a dining room table, but the one they had was in horrible shape so I passed on that. I got 6 Coca-cola glasses though. I went by Staples for a desk but they didn’t have the one I wanted. So I went back to Staples in the evening and got a different desk. Also went to Target just to pick up a few kitchen items (dish soap, garbage can, milk, etc). Spent about an hour putting the desk together. After I moved all my stuff onto the desk, I called this lady in Corvallis that had a file cabinet in the paper a few days ago to see if she still had it. She did, so I drove there and picked it up. It was only $30 – they usually go for at least $100 in the store. Anyway, here’s my new office…

Nov. 16th, 2005|02:33 pm:

ME: “Hey, quit biting that guy.”
HER: “Quit biting what guy?”
ME: “Your husband or boyfriend or whatever.”
HER: “Oh, I don’t bite nobody.”
ME: “Oh, we could hear him yelling at you to quit biting him.”
HER: “It’s just this little tiff that we get into, he teases me about biting. Who is this? Is this Selena?”
ME: “No, we’re here in your motel with you. Hey, can you be more creative next time? Like shake up a coke can and spray it in his face or something?”
HER: “Sure, I can do that.” (She’s like giggling now)
ME: “I’d appreciate it if you mix it up, and make it more interesting.”
HER: “No problem!”
ME: “Thanks!”
HER: “Oh, you’re _welcome_.” (It reads sarcastic, but she sounded completely sincere.)

Nov. 16th, 2005|01:42 pm: Moved out of the motel today and into my new apartment. It’s nice to be away from the crazy crackhead motel neighbors of mine, but I sort of miss them in a way. As I checked out of the motel, I mentioned their zany antics to the lady at the front desk and she agreed with me that they were pretty bizzare people. She said he always looks drunk. I never did get a good look at him so for all I know, it was Larry. But I think he was way too young to be Larry. Sounds and acts exactly like him though.

Last night, the son came to the room with two friends. And the motel manager showed up immediately after they went in, knocked on their door and ordered them all to leave. He appeared to know one of the guys that came into the room with him and told the people that he didn’t want “riff raff like that” on the motel’s property. After the manager left, the couple yelled at each other for a few minutes but after that it was quiet for the rest of the night. I recorded during the manager incident but I haven’t listened to it yet to see how it came out. It wasn’t that interesting anyway.

My new apartment rocks. It’s quiet and clean. There’s a shiny green telco can right in my front yard which makes me feel right at home. I have no furniture, though. My desk is a cardboard box and I’m sitting on the floor. I stopped by Staples today to buy a desk (desk is a priority over a bed, of course) but they were out of the one I wanted. I’m supposed to check back today or tomorrow to see if they get one in. There is not one single closet here so I’m going to have to do something about that. There’s a spare room that I might just turn into a big walk-in closet for all of us.

Last night my plan was to get to bed early so I could wake up around 6am or so. Which would have gone great if it wasn’t for the neighbors. Earlier in the day yesterday, I’d opened up the cable TV jack in the wall and dug through about 7 inches of insulation to expose the back of THEIR cable TV jack. So all that was separating us was a thin piece of plastic. My plan was to set my digital recorder in the wall and get some good recordings of their fights. Jammie says I’m doing this out of boredom, but I say it’s out of fascination with these people. I think it’s amazing that they just go on and on and on with their arguing for hours at a time. So this is like a National Geographic thing for me – I’m trying to study and record them from a distance. It’s not creepy at all, I swear.

Anyway, the digital recorder didn’t pick up anything. So I went to Target and bought a PC microphone for $9.99. It’s one of the long ones, so it was able to reach all the way to the back of their plastic thing, pressed right up against it. But still, I just couldn’t hear anything. So I gave up on that, put the TV jack back together and went for a more low-tech approach – I put the microphone under the door. And it worked! The quality isn’t that great, but it works. They got home soon after I got back from Target and they ranted at each other for a full hour, which I recorded directly onto my PC. I’ll have to go through it later and pull out the good parts.

So yesterday evening, after an early dinner of Nutter Butters, I decided that I would go to bed very early. I spent the rest of the evening reading and talking to Jammie. By 9:30 or so, I was trying to sleep but the people next door were going nuts on each other. He was hitting her, she was biting him, they were both yelling a lot. If I weren’t so determined to get to sleep early, I could have had some classic stuff recorded. It just went on and on for hours. But I put an extra pillow over my head to muffle the sound and eventually went to sleep. I awoke at 5:30am and they were STILL YELLING. I’m not sure if it went on all night, but they were still pretty pissed. I finally got up for the day an hour later and they were completely silent.

This morning, my water was orange. Last night, Jammie made fun of me for a large portion of our conversation because I said, “I think there’s something wrong with the motel’s water.”

“Why?”

“Because when I turn on the faucet, there’s no water.”

I got lots of “OH, YOU THINK?” and references to Sherlock Holmes. When the water finally came back on, I told her it probably wasn’t safe to drink and I’d need to boil it or something. And she made fun of me more for that. Well, if I wasn’t so tired this morning, I would have thought to take a picture of the ORANGE WATER POURING OUT OF MY SHOWER to show her. I had the same thing in my sink. After running it for a few minutes, it finally turned clear again. Nice of the motel to warn us…

This morning I went to breakfast at the Original Breakfast restaurant. On my way out, I slammed the door as hard as possible, hoping to possibly jolt the neighbors awake. When I got back I did the same thing and I could hear the guy muttering about something. I went out for a Pepsi, slammed the door, came back inside, slammed the door, more muttering. I’m not pissed or anything, I just want them to wake up and start yelling at each other some more.

Nov. 14th, 2005|12:13 pm: I got home from Subway and the neighbors were at it – “fuckin'” was every other word. They made up, though, and now I hear laughing. A few minutes ago, she came near the door that separates our rooms, I think to pick out a shirt for him, and she says, “Honey, is flannel okay?” It’s funnier to hear it in her drunken-sounding country twangyish voice. As they left just a second ago, she was rambling about AA meetings. I peeked out my window to get a look at them and they were exactly as I pictured. Now they’re trying to start their truck. This should take awhile.

I hate how I can’t completely pull in any radio stations in this town. The few good ones I find have just enough static in them to make it unbearable to listen to. The one station that comes in really good happens to be country music. Which is the station they play at Subway. Cricket Country, it’s called. Maybe it’s time to finally activate my Sirius satellite-ready radio.

I thought I saw a black woman the other day. But as I got closer, I realized she was just Mexican. It was stupid to think that there’d be a black woman seen in this town. That just doesn’t happen. Okay, enough complaining about Albany for the day. I’ll resume tomorrow. I really do like this city, overall. I’m just nitpicking everything.

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Nov. 15th, 2005|05:32 pm: Today my neighbors were quiet for the most part, but a few times they got into it because she wanted to sleep in all day and he wanted to go out and get breakfast. As of this writing (5:40pm) she still hasn’t gotten out of bed. I noticed, while listening to the recording, there’s actually a 3rd person in that room. Their son! He sounds like a teenager and he’s not too loud. I heard him call her mom a few times. The man sounds exactly like Larry. In fact, he looks a lot like him too, but I think he’s a little younger. Maybe they’re related. Here are some sound clips of this guy trying to get his wife up for breakfast…

• How dare you bite me! This is him trying to get her out of bed in the morning.
  
• You’re a jerk! – You’re a bitch! In this one she insists that she’s not going and they call each other names.
  
• Goddamn crazy This is just them arguing back and forth for a bit.
  
• Try to bite me! He tells her he’s a bigger animal than she is.

There’s lots more audio than I’ve posted here. The problem is that the sound quality isn’t that great. I’m going to mess around with the sound files in Cooledit and see what I can do. And there’s sure to be lots more arguing tonight.

My next door motel neighbors get more and more bizarre every day. I wish I could hear more of the conversation. It sounds like they have a pretty exciting life. Today she was ranting about something that involved her saying “They’d have no proof! I would deny it!” every few sentences. The guy was yelling that he was ready to kill someone. I heard her complaining about being in protective custody at some point. Something about bus tickets. They’ve been there for a week now. They’ll leave to go somewhere, get in their truck and crank the starter for several minutes straight. Sometimes it will start up and they’ll rev the engine for awhile before it dies. Then they’ll go back to cranking the starter for another few minutes. It amazes me that the battery never gives out. The guy just left a few minutes ago. It took him a few minutes to get the truck going, but he finally left. When they can’t get it started they’ll come back into their room, extra pissed off for the night. Luckily they were fairly tame last night when the kids stayed over.

Yesterday morning, the guy’s cell phone kept ringing. I guess he doesn’t know how to stop it from ringing when he doesn’t want to answer it. It seems to ring fairly early each morning and it’ll ring the full 4 times before going to voice mail. Yesterday someone kept trying to call them. On the 3rd attempt the guy yelled, “FUCK you!” at his cell phone to try and stop it from ringing. It didn’t work.

Yesterday I went to the post offices (I have 2 of them I have to visit until my mail gets consolidated into just the cheap one), visited the Book Bin in downtown and bought 3 books. I got The Complete Novels of Mark Twain, volumes 1 and 2. They’re both copyrighted in the 1960’s and I think they’re fairly complete. Then I got the Encyclopedia of World History which is copyrighed in the 1940’s. I’m so overloaded on books that I need to read. I’m not even finished with the Mark Twain bio that I started over a month ago. I also went to the thrift store and looked around for awhile. I think I’ll be buying my dishes there once I get moved into my apartment. Lots of good stuff there for cheap. I went by a bike shop and I went to Wendy’s for lunch. I later found out that Colleen and the kids went through the drive-thru there while I was inside eating.

At the UPS Store, some guy in his mid-20’s stopped me and said, “You’re from Illinois??” (He noticed my license plate.) So I told him I was, what part I was from and he said he was from Effingham. The weird thing is, this guy had no teeth at all. No teeth. And he was in his 20’s. It seems like there’s a lot of this around here because he’s the 3rd young guy that I’ve seen in the past couple weeks with no teeth. At the parade, a couple of guys walked by me probably in their mid 20’s and the one that was talking was missing his 4 front teeth. Other than that he looked like a very normal person. I’m just wondering how someone loses so many teeth so early in life. My friend Shonna in Illinois lost all of hers in her late 20’s because of drugs. Meth, I think. Maybe meth is just really big around here. Or maybe I just happen to be running into the few residents with no teeth.

Around 1:30 I picked up the kids from Colleen’s. I really hoped the kids would be up for the idea of seeing Zathura at the theater. And they were. We stopped by the theater to check the times on it and we ended up getting there just as it started. The kids say it was better than Jumanji. I really liked it, but I think Jumanji was much better. Definitely not a disappointing movie, though. Went back to the motel for awhile and then went to Izzy’s for dinner. Emily picked Izzy’s and I had a little trouble finding it. It was a nice buffet restuarant, though. It’s weird taking directions for things from Emily. She told me where Burger King was this afternoon for lunch too. She knows the town better than me. I still take wrong turns and get a little lost occasionally.

Before the movie I took the kids by my new place. We walked around it and they looked in a few windows. Looks like they’re still painting it and renovating the bathroom. They seem happy enough with it. Today we went to Albertson’s for donuts. (Going out for 3 meals a day is getting expensive) Some old guy there knew Emily and gave her a hug. He claims he saw me at the parade with them which is BS since I wasn’t at the parade with them. Guess he works at the after-school thing though. Hung around the motel most of the day, played some Legos. I think I napped for a short time, read some of my book, watched Jumanji on TV. Took them back to Colleen’s at 2, after some lunch at Burger King.

It’s still rained every day and there’s plenty of more rain in the forecast. The end of this week, rain is being replaced by “areas of fog” in the forecast so maybe that’s a good thing. I wish there’d just be a few really nice days here before winter officially starts. It’s hard to enjoy exploring the town very much when it just rains all the time.