This still counts as Wednesday. Damn it.

I set myself a goal; update ye olde blogge every day. It's technically Thursday right now, but since I just got home from work and haven't gone to bed yet it counts. Yes way, Ted; it totally counts.

Sometime between taking the D to school and her getting off the bus we lost a neighborhood tree today. I don't know what happened; it wasn't particularly windy or stormy, at least not enough for me to take notice. Maybe the high winds (50 or so mph gusts) damaged the tree earlier this week, but for whatever reason the stately maple tree at the corner of Overdale and Alma is gone. I personally choose to make up (and believe!) that it was downed by a drunken college student in an F150. Probably with a set of artificial truck testes dangling from the back bumper. Nice driving, dick.

I was a guest speaker!

Yesterday at about 12:30 or so I was hit by a bolt of memory lightning; I had to speak to Delia's class at 2. Her teacher had sent home a form asking for volunteers, and D told me that they were having trouble getting people to show up, so I signed up for it. What the hells, it was only a fifteen minute commitment and I love public speaking

When I got to the class the teacher subtly emphasized that I would be saying how my job helped the community. So I start winging it, telling the kids that I'm a graphic artist who works in desktop publishing, advertising used cars...blah blah blah. They don't care. I know how an audience works, so I started telling them about Photoshop, which they also don't care about. Then I tell them that Photoshop was invented by Industrial Light and Magic, to work on special effects for Star Wars. It was like shooting lighting out of my eyes. They went, in about one second from "dude, we don't know what you're talking about" to "Holy crap; he MADE STAR WARS!" It was pretty awesome.

In other news, I'm still pissed at my cable company for taking away PBS, Cartoon Network and the History Channel. I know I only pay nine dollars or so a month for cable, but PBS? Really, Comcast, seriously? I live in the same town as the station. It wouldn't be so bad if you hadn't run commercials for months saying that Comcast customers didn't have to worry about the new conversion to digital cable. Yo, Comcast, you guys are liars. I do have to get a conversion box to watch my local PBS station. I don't want to spend $40 for one channel, but I'm going to. Gods know there isn't anything on SyFy.

As for you, SyFy...dudes, you aren't even trying. There is some show on right now with a few fifteen year old kids going to someplace called the Vortex. I think it's in New Jersey. They keep saying something about a munitions factory exploding there, and one lady who is very insistent that there are spirits there, "locked in time and space". I'm not sure what this show is, but it's terrible. It's like Ghost Hunters, if Ghost Hunters came from Fanjul's Factory Outlet. Holy crap, I'm sure if they let these turds on this show they'd let me and my jackass friends on. These kids on now should have worn brown trousers, if you catch my drift.

Hot Bliggity Blog

I'm trying to post something daily now. My boss told me last week that the only way to get people to read your blog is to keep it freshly updated, presumably because a lot of people have an attention span utterly decimated by television. I don't have any problems believing this at all.

It's only 9AM on this dreary Monday, and I've accomplished things. Payed a few bills...freakin' bills. Bills are the bane of my existence. I made a resolution for 2009 to be more fiscally responsible, but it's tough going. Budgeting has never been a particularly strong point with me. I'm better at it than I am at, say, not drinking coffee until my hair stands on end, but that's not saying much. Most people don't have that problem either. Or do they?

The problem with daily updates is thinking of something to say. To newsworthy items happened over the weekend.

1. Flavored cigarettes are now banned in the US. I don't smoke flavored cigarettes. I've never been a goth kid, so I didn't need them to mask the scent of an abandoned bus station while listening to the Cure hoping my hairspray is helping me look depressed. I doubt if I've ever smoked more than one or two of these things all the way through. Once in high school we had a Renaissance Festival, and someone made an apple pie using a period recipe. It had a buttload of clove in it, to mask the taste of the rotten apples that would have been the main ingredient during the Renaissance. So that's what clove cigarettes always reminded me off; rotten apples. Grodacious. Totally grodacious.

2. My brother-in-law John's friend Dave was stabbed over the weekend. He's in the hospital but slated to recover, from what I've gleaned from Facebook. This is some grade A crazy shit. Friday night John was here, and was (I think) shocked to hear my friend Chris and I assure him that Morgantown has a large number of weekend fights on the streets. Then he goes home to this crap. They caught the guy who knifed him, which is good. It's hard to tell what they'll charge him with, but I can easily see how stabbing someone with a knife would land you with attempted murder. I think it should, but then again I'm sure once lawyers get involved there will be this and that extenuating circumstance, flim flammery, and outright lying. I hope the dude goes to prison, because if he doesn't John likely will.

Good luck, Dave. John, don't shoot anyone.

Psychic Tom is apparently no Psychic Tina

Last night we went to a Dead People Party at my friend Angie's (codename: Angie Frangie) house. It was first presented to me as a Supernatural Party, which was kind of confusing costume-wise. The reason it was a Supernatural Party is because the ladies decided that if we all coughed up like fifteen bucks we could hire Psychic Tina to come and predict our futures for us. How it became a Dead People Party I'm not quite sure, but everyone with the inclination to dress up in a costume came as walking corpses (note; we were not zombies). I would post pictures, but I left our camera at Angie's.

So there we were, with our fake bullet holes and cut throats and slit wrists, hanging out on Angie's front porch when this older dude drives by looking for an address that was actually Angie's but which he must have written down incorrectly. He kept driving by slowly, looking at us as if we'd lied to him about house numbers before he finally figured out that we were by far the most likely group to have hired him. So he gets out of the car and we're all like, "whoa; where in hells is Psychic Tina?" And he's all like, "Yo babies, be cool; Psychic Tom is in the house taken care of business."

Actually he didn't talk that way at all. I exaggerate for color, a free service to you. What he really said was that he was just as good as Psychic Tina.

Now, a lot of the people there didn't seem to think Psychic Tom was all that psychic, but I liked him. I've read books on Gypsy fortunetelling tricks to pull on rubes, and maybe I am a rube, but I want to believe Psychic Tom, because I liked what he had to say. For the most part.

I liked that he said I was going to live a long-ass time. This was from the palm and one of the first things he said to me. Then he told me that I was under-employed and likely would be for about two years or so before moving on. He told me that 2010 and 2011 would be better years financially than we're accustomed to. So all in all it was a pretty sweet future being laid out.

I can't help but wonder why Psychic Tom, being psychic and all, didn't seem to know that I was a powerful sorcerer in my own right. He didn't even mention it, or turn pale, or tremble or anything. No reaction whatsoever. So while I want to believe Psychic Tom is going to be right about my future I'm just not sure I'm buying it.

No offense, Psychic Tom.

Blogger V. Wordpress

In what I'm sure will turn into something akin to the epic battle of XTC V. Adam Ant (power-based pop V. new romantics) I've decided to do a side by side of Blogger and Wordpress. Blogger is easy and familiar; Wordpress is complicated but apparently lets you do a lot of neato things. So far results are pending.

I signed up for Wordpress yesterday at work while we were waiting for the final go-ahead to come through. All I did was register and make it look like I wanted, then it was time to go. I spend a good deal of time in the car on Fridays. Yesterday I spent it thinking of how to maintain two blogs simultaneously.

I came up with this plan to use the new one for an extended piece of fiction, a fake blog that I would gradually introduce a weird happening into, extrapolating on it until it got weirder and weirder without ever bothering to explain that it isn't true. But what to say? At first I thought about including a weird dwarf that would follow me around after a while, doing things like mugging people with orthopedic shoes in order to be incrementally taller. I had to scrap that as being insensitive (not just because I don't know any little people.) Then I thought it would be fun to recruit a cohort, someone to play the part of "The Creeper" in the story. All The Creeper would really need to do is let me take a few pictures every now and again, preferably while dressed all creepy and hiding in bushes. Maybe a short video of The Creeper being fled from in a car. No big deal. A Creeper email address (with only the picture of my volunteer Creeper attached to a fake name) also struck me as being a good way to gradually make his/her presence more immediate.

This was a very exciting idea yesterday while I was driving down to Clarksburg, but I don't know if it's really very feasible. You can't just go up to your friends and say, "hey, you're one creepy looking sonuvabitch, wanna be kinda almost semi famous?" So now that little project is on hold while I think it through a little more. Which means you're stuck with just this, my regular run-of-the-mill blog. If I go through with it I'll post a notice here. Addios.

Back into the proverbial swing of things

So it's been a really long time since I last posted anything. I took some time off in the months leading up to super beach vacation (which was a hoot), but it took me until now to start posting again. Sorry about that. Hope your deprivation didn't cause scurvy or rickets.

I'm at work right now, so this is going to be short. I've been thinking for a long time about scanning my notes from our Friday meetings. Here's the first installment. Bon appetit.