LifeBox

GARG! WAH!

Yesterday was another sick day, sorta. I did the rolling for one half of the living room, and the edging for the other half. Went home, watched some of Bernie’s romantic comedies – which sucked – and passed out.

Not as sick today, but still feeling pretty down. The living room looks great – very yellow. Bernie started on peeling off all the tape, in preparation for getting ready to do the trim, and I removed all the wallpaper from the nasty bathroom. Mold, crud, bad wall. Yuck. Went to the Depot to get a bunch of stuff – again – including a new water heater. Ours is busted, and we’ve given up on the tankless, so I just got a new forty gallon gas heater, and the guy working the aisle came over and installed it for eighty bucks less than the regular store installers would have charged to do it, so, sweet.

Dave and Mel came over to check the place out and get some food – we drove up to this place way up north that has New York style pizza, and it ruled. Hung out for a while, got the dirt on all the derby and rock star stuff, came home, worked, rested.

We’re having a disagreement about how to do the bathroom. We’re pretty much decided on tiling, since the wall is so assy, but I want to do some cellular automata patterns on the wall, and Bernie is so not into it. So, I threw together a little Flash application that does simple 1-dimensional CAs, and Bernie can pick which one she likes in the morning. I get the feeling that this is going to be leveraged into a compromise somewhere else, so it better look really cool…

Yesterday was sort of a wash. Woke up with a head full of snot, got some coffee from Jo’s, went over to paint around noon. I did one half of one of the ceilings, then pretty much fell over. Way too sick to do that crap. So, Bernie took me back to the apartment and made me rest, then went back and did the other half. I was in and out all day. Suck.

Bernie got me a book about stuff for a present. Yay presents.

Hey, there’s party people puking in the courtyard. Classy. Plus, we can hear the upstairs neighbors fighting about the chick’s job. Bernie thinks she’s a stripper, and I think she’s right. Woo!

So, Ijust woke up again – still full of snot – and I’m going to try to get the walls done today, so we can move stuff in this weekend. I hope I’m well enough to move most of it myself. If not, we hire movers. Bah.

Wow, painting celilings is no fun at all. Especially when they’re as messed up as ours are. On the plus side, we have DSL now. Yay speakeasy!

Took a rest and had us some lunch at Threadgill’s. I swear, they have the best Buffalo-style chicken fingers outside of Buffalo.

There’s some religious tension going on in the IRC channel that I hang out in with the kids back in California, and associated crew. I don’t think I’m helping. Makes for interesting conversations, but I think some people are getting genuinely pissed. Well. Let’s have a story, then.

One christmas, when I was a little kid, maybe six or seven, my mother brought me a christmas card to sign for my cousin Mike. He’s a couple of years younger than I am, and we were pretty much like brothers throughout our childhood. Anyway, the card was just something simple, with a picture of the baby Jesus in a cradle or something. I didn’t want to sign the card, I told my mother, because I knew that he wouldn’t like it. “Why not?” she asked. “Because Jesus is stupid!” I think I got in trouble for that. The end.

Here’s the other side of that story. I’m just slightly younger, and my little sister and I are at some “family haircut” type place to get, you guessed it, a haircut. Maybe it was someplace where a friend of my mom’s worked or something. Anyway, I was being a kid, fooling around and climbing on the chairs while I waited for my turn. I’m sure I was told to cut it out, but hey, I was a little kid. Eventually, I slipped and fell, and banged myself somewhere, and it hurt. This is the sympathy I got from mom: “That’s God’s way of punishing you for misbehaving.” Thanks, God.

Back to the present day, I think we’re having a “not made here” problem at the new house. All the old stuff sucks, and we have to totally re-do everything ourselves, so it doesn’t suck. This is obviously impractical, and prohibitively expensive. We’ll see what happens.

Oh yeah, and my fucking Black Christmas DVD was all fucked up. Couldn’t watch the last 10 minutes, which are sort of important to a movie like this. Fucking Netflix.

This morning, I woke up around 5:30 am, with my head in a block of snot concrete. Steamed my sorry ass for a while to loosen stuff up, read for a couple of hours, and went back to bed.

Later on, it was back to the house, where I took apart the ceiling fans so we could clean and paint around them on the ceiling. Next up, more taping, sanding, and filling holes with spackle. Then, yet another trip to Home Depot; I know where everything is now, so as long as I use the self-checkout, I don’t have to actually interact with any primates there, which is good.

Our rat guy came by, gave us a bug treatment, set traps, and told us that we have a leaky roof, just in time for a killer-ass thunderstorm tonight. Looks like it might hold for a while, though, so, we’ll see how that goes.

Had dinner at Magnolia, watched some big lightning strikes all around, and had a nice little walk home trough the storm.

So, I’m not hungry any more, but now I’m tired, sick, wet, and full. I think a movie is in order, then beds. Putting in Black Christmas. Mmmm, young Margot Kidder.

(later…)

This just in: the policy that the sellers had to take out doesn’t cover the roof. Looks like we get to fix the roof ourselves. Yay. Plus, i think we decided not to get the tankless water heater – we can only find one or two people willing to even think about installing it, and then it’ll cost like a thousand bucks, plus $500 for the heater itself, and hey! We can spend all that money on the roof now! Oh, joy.

Just Guns is gone. I don’t know where to, but it ain’t there no more. Sad day in Austin.

We got up and puttered a bit today, then went over to have a send-off lunch for Rich with Dave and Mel at Hill’s Cafe, down the street. Super nice weather today, so we sat outside and had corn nuggets and fried stuff. Yummy tasty. Mr. Dean is on a train back to San Francisco tonight, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he showed up down here again sometime soon, on a more permanent basis. There’s some tricky stuff going on that might snag a plan like that up, but sometimes these things just work out. Anyway, it’ll be fun to get more folks from the old town to move down this way. Come on, slackers! What are you hanging around in that chilly old ghost town for? Git on down heah!

After recovering from lunch a bit, it was more prep work on the living room at the new house. I ran out to the depot again to get some supplies, and Bernie stayed home and scrubbed. I finished transporting our massive media stash to the new place, and went over the walls and ceiling again to rinse off all the nasty, slippery TSP before we go to town. Tomorrow is all about spackle and sanding, getting our paint, and then we start for real.

Plus, we started doing laundry at the new place. Laundry. Inside! Very exciting.

On the entertainment front – because I’ve got so much free time right now – there are a few good games coming up. I’m hearing more good things about Metroid Prime, and the new Zelda games should be showing up pretty soon. Plus, Midnight Club 2 looks ruling, which means that I need to get that network adaptor thing hooked up, too. All this also means that I really need to get cracking on my payoff games, so I can sleep with a clear conscience.

But man, i’m tired.

Today was more moving boxes and cleaning. Bernie scrubbed the rest of the walls in the living room, and I finished bringing over all the books and games, and most of the media. We’ve probably got around 30 or 40 heavy boxes of those – if I didn’t learn that little carrying stacks of boxes on my back from our previous mover guys, I’d be completely flat on my ass from a splintered back at this point.

We cut out our daily toil early today, though, to do the annual Oscars party at the Alamo Drafthouse. The Mr. Sinus guys split up between three theaters, and ran funny clips of various nominees and winners during commercial breaks. Plus, beer, fried food, and tasty desserts. We were in the theater with Jerm, who provided color commentary throughout the event, and lead us in singalongs and contests and stuff. Mel won the big prize ($100 gift certificate and a little trophy) for picking the most winners! We also got some sweet photos of Jerm in his Daredevil pants.

If you actually care about what happened at the Oscars, you’re looking in the wrong place, because I don’t. It was fun, but that was mostly because we were all hanging out drinkin’ beer and having a hoot at the theater. Plus, boobies. Oh, yeah. My new plan is to win myself an Oscar so I can make out with Halle Berry on live television. That is all.

Oh, yeah, one more thing. Michael Moore ruled.

Man, being sick sucks. It sucks twice as much when you’re supposed to be cleaning and moving and stuff. We’re getting started on prepping the new living room for painting; yesterday, we had lunch with our friend Kyra, who gave us her advice about colors and all that. Mmmm, Habana. Later on, I carried about half a ton of books over there, and started removing crap that we didn’t want, like some nasty shelves that were bolted onto the wall with stripped screws, and some really nice outlet and light switch face plates. Filthy miniblinds, nails, hooks, all gone. Meanwhile, Bernie is getting down with the TSP, scrubbing the walls clean for the primer and paint. It’s ugly and dirty, but it needs to get done.

Meanwhile, my throat is raw and scratchy, and I think that phase two of the nasty cold that’s been going around is hitting me. Starting to get the chills, and more phlegm and the hurting and the bad language and the glavin. Perfect for working around dirt and dust and industrial cleaning solutions. And carrying heavy stuff. Ah, well, at least I’ll get to rest sometime soon. AAAAHHHHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

One of our other pressing tasks is getting the water heater replaced. The current one is pretty old and corroded, and I wouldn’t trust it not to explode or something further than I can throw it – and it’s pretty heavy, so that’s not far. So, we want to get one of those snazzy new tankless water heaters – they’re a good chunk more to start off with, but they save a lot of money, so it should pay for itself within a few years, plus there’s no tank to explode or anything, and it takes up a lot less space. We’ve found a couple of major hardware supply stores (which shall remain nameless) that carry them, but nobody is willing to even consider installing them. This bothers me for two reasons: first off, this indicates to me that this is “unsupported” technology, which might cause problems later on if something goes blooey – even though it’s been around for decades – and second, I’m beginning to think that we might have to install it ourselves. I’ve been doing a bit of research, and as far as I can tell, it’s a pretty standard install – you got your water, you got your gas, you plug it all in, and it goes, just like a regular tank heater. I’m wondering what is so strange and different about these that scare all the burly plumber-men away. Well, I guess we’ll just have to give it a shot and find out…

Lawrence Lessig is an excellent speaker.

Watching his keynote about copyright and the Creative Commons at SXSw today, I had a little epiphany about the way I speak. Most of the time, I talk really fast, with a good deal of mumbling and a little bit of stuttering thrown in here and there. I fall over my own words, and punctuate my thoughts with a lot of “uhhh” and “ummmm”. Lessig speaks slowly, clearly, and purposefully, with a pacing and cadence that captures an audience, because he prepares his thoughts, and believes in his message. I stumble all over myself because I generally don’t know what my message is, if I ever have a message. I speak quickly so as to get across some basic idea, getting it over as soon as I can, taking up as little of the listener’s time as possible. Usually, this just results in my sounding like an ass.

So, how about that war?

Anyhoo. We started moving stuff into the new house today. Comic books are really heavy, it turns out. I got about a dozen boxes of books and some miscellaneous stuff in there, but even though we had a carpet cleaner come in and give the place a once-over, it still smells pretty doggy, so we picked up some more cleaning supplies on our daily trip to Home Depot today to see what we can do about that.

Speaking of which, I got that “Home Improvement 1-2-3” book of theirs, and it’s pretty cool. I stayed up all night last night flipping through it, and I’m feeling a lot more confident about the level of the projects we’re talking about taking on with the new place. Removing wallpaper, painting all the rooms, maybe replacing carpet, installing a tankless water heater, tiling the kitchen and the front walk, removing and replacing doors, building bookshelves, rewiring and adding sockets to the bathroom, running some network cables, maybe opening up a closet wall to make a little reading area… Yeah, we got stuff to do now. But first, the moving.

I got a new camera. I love it. Plus, I just got my taxes done, and the combination of not making any money last year, moving and working out of my home office got me a nice refund, so I can actually afford it. So, yay my new tax guy.

We’ve been pretty busy lately, if you hadn’t noticed, and we haven’t been getting to the gym at all. We’re both getting poochy and tired. Mmmm. Next week, maybe. I’m thinking of trying to run some. Maybe not. We’ll see.

Two technical asides. Majcher.com is currently graciously hosted by Phil, in the little closet under his stairs. Once we get DSL hooked up in the new house next week, and give it a little time to settle down, I’ll be transferring everything to a server there, so. Also, my eyes are getting really bad – I’ve got an eye doctor appointment in a few weeks, but it’s really bugging me now. As such, I may not be proofreading as well as I could as I go along, so if you find a typo, keep it to your damn self. Jeez.