Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

Quote

I have a small yellowed scrap of paper, now laminated with several layers of scotch tape, that I've had stuck to every computer monitor going back to the one that came with the 386 Packard Bell I bought with my tax refund in 1992.

There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.

--Kenneth Olsen, President and founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, in 1977

Along came a spider

There is nothing like a macro lens to get me past fear.

Plus, in real life, the body of the thing was maybe half a centimeter. I wish I'd have focused better, but you need to be able to see something to focus on it.

"Never underestimate the popularity of a 30–year–old TV pop cultural icon"

If you needed another reason to visit Milwaukee:

Bronze the Fonz

I'm curious...I'm certainly in the cohort that could consider the Fonz iconic, but what about anybody born after, say, 1980? Do they even know who he is?

I suppose it's not fair to compare the minor characters the Tuscadero sisters to Fonzie, but when I had rats named Pinky and Leather, I saw a definite generation gap between those who did Pinky's hand-snap thing when they heard the names, and those who looked confused and said "Don't you mean Pinky and the Brain?"

Boy is my face red

I don't mean that figuratively, as in, I'm embarrassed (although I probably ought to be). I mean it literally, as in, I sat in shallow left field for the whole baseball game Sunday afternoon without sunscreen or a hat.

It's a little painful to comb my hair, because my scalp is burned. It is excruciatingly painful to walk among the cubes at work and hear people say "Whoa, Nic, got some sun, huh?" over and over and over.

I remember when I got braces in seventh grade, I was a little distressed that people would laugh at me because of how they looked. The day after I had them put on, a friend of mine said "Smile!" When I grudgingly showed him the new hardware, he said "So can you pick up DC101? Do you have to brush your teeth with Ziebart? Can you subcontract your mouth to Amtrak?"...and on he went, every orthodontic taunt ever made, and then some. Halfway through, I was laughing so hard I appeared to be crying, which is when our social studies teacher showed up and reprimanded my friend.

I'm not sure what point I was trying to make there--better to laugh at yourself than care if people stare at you because your face is the color of the Nationals Sunday home jersey? (Bright red, with the interlocking DC trimmed in navy blue and metallic gold, as Charlie would describe it.)

I'm sure today will be the last day anybody comments. It's going to start to peel soon, and even my coworkers won't say "Wow, Nic, looks like you are molting!" (At least, not to my face.)

Memorial Day

Yes, I am enjoying the long weekend...baseball, good friends, hiking, and perhaps we will fire up the grill tonight.

But I still have to stop and think about why today is a holiday.

Image courtesy of Arlington National Cemetery.

Today I shall talk about something else

Today I shall talk about...

Uh, about...

It's hard to derail a one-track mind, I guess.

When I was a kid, a friend of my grandfather had an old brass diving helmet. He had a pool, too, and at a party one summer we got to use the helmet. When you put the thing on, you could walk around the bottom of the pool, breathing, seeing clearly, and with no buoyancy at all (if you were eight years old, anyway.) I remember coming up the steps with the helmet on, though, and it weighted more than a ton.

One time I was having x-rays taken, and the technician had outfitted me in a lead vest. Something was wrong with the camera, and she had me go across the hall to a different room, and just walking the few steps in the lead vest was a noticeable effort.

When I am anxious about something, I wear the anxiety like a diving helmet and a lead vest together. I can barely move.

(Censored)

Pretend you just read a long block of text about my job. Incredulously say "I don't believe it!"

Yep, it's true, every word.

Shake your head in sympathy.

Thanks. This too shall pass, but for now, well, I can't wait for the weekend.

Oh, the Capital Weather Gang are getting my hopes up.

Memorial Day Weekend is shaping up to offer very nice weather indeed. We'll experience mostly sunny skies Saturday through Monday with high temperatures in the mid to upper 70s on Saturday and Sunday, possibly warming to the low 80s on Monday.

Oh please, oh please. I could use some sun and some baseball and a hike (and possibly a bottle of wine) to get my head back where it needs to be.

I got a Bull Durham quote for everything

Well, Nuke's scared 'cause his eyelids are jamming and his old man is here, we need a live rooster--is it a live rooster?--a live rooster to take the curse off Jose's glove, and nobody seems to know what to get Millie and Jimmy for their wedding present. We're dealing with a lot of shit.

That's from memory, might be off by a few words.

I have a thing at work that's giving me an ulcer, but it being a work thing, I can't talk about it. The cold and damp has me hobbling around I'm 80 years old, with the pain from arthritis or tendinitis or whatever is wrong with my knees and hips. And I never got my May mortgage statement in the mail, which I didn't notice until Sunday when I went looking for the June statement, so I was 19 days late paying the May mortgage.

Realistically, I don't think a late payment of 19 days will have that significant an effect on my credit rating, and I'm not looking to buy anything requiring a loan right now anyway.

And candlesticks are always nice.

Where'd I put the dust pan and broom?

The new computer is on a plane (or perhaps a truck) on its way to me already, so I really need to clean the junk off this one. Oh sure, I could just plug in a cable and transfer files, but when I first started poking around, I found nested folders with names like "oldharddrivebackup" inside "misc file from C" inside "to copy" inside "my documents."

It's like when we cleaned out my grandmother' basement and I found a bag inside a box containing a bag full of bags.

I really need to break this disorganized pack rat cycle.

Of course, every time I get a new computer, I say this time it will be different. This time, I won't name things "1.txt" or save everything on my desktop.

For some reason, that grand lie made me remember Larry Miller's "Five levels of drinking" (for the end, of course.)

I'm not going to get stuff sorted out tonight. Maybe I'll just pick up a big external drive of the way home tomorrow, copy the whole shebang, and organize it later.

In other non-news

Does anybody use Vista?

I'm wondering how panicked I really need to be about the discontinuation of Windows XP. I actually went ahead and ordered my replacement desktop PC last night (it wasn't a complete snap decision; I've been mulling it over for awhile...although the one I'm using is only 3 years old, and it had a clean reinstall of everything and a new hard drive just two years ago. But I am getting greedy and lusting after multi-core processors, because dammit, I want to edit those rat videos faster.)

My laptop really is old, slow, and given to fits of failure. I actually brought the desktop in under what I'd budgeted, so I'm toying with the idea of picking up a laptop too, while I can still get an XP.

It's also occurred to me, I've never even seen a computer running under Vista. I have a vague idea that nobody likes it, but I have no actual data. So in case anybody besides my sister is still around out there...anybody got an opinion?

Twilight zone

Let's just establish as a given that I am more depressed than I have a right to be about the Kolzig situation. It is, as they say, what it is.

Before the baseball game last night, I was telling my mom about a Rob Mackowiak interview I'd heard, and she was talking about his beautiful catch in Houston the other night (the one he followed with the home run). And I said "But I will never have a favorite player again, ever. It's just an invitation to heartbreak."

Then I watched the Marlins clobber the Nationals, which could have been a mental diversion. But in the ugly fourth inning, right around the time O'Connor had loaded up the bases and Hanrahan came into the game with a wild pitch, I finished my Coke and realized that there was something written on the bottom of my cup.

I flipped it over:

"Ok," I said out loud, to the sky. "Now you're just messing with my head."

I knew it was coming

A blow, expected, repeated, falling on a bruise, with no smart or shock of surprise, only a dull and sickening pain and the doubt whether another like it could be borne.

~Evelyn Waugh

After 16 Seasons, Kolzig Says He Won't Return to the Capitals

When I say I have come to terms with something (like, for example, after game 7 saying "I have come to terms with the fact that seeing Olie Kolzig wave to the crowd from the ice tonight was the last time I'll see him in a Capitals uniform.") what I obviously mean is "I am going to obsess about this for weeks and wallow in abject depression."

And I really need to stop reading blogs and message boards, because clearly there are many posters who have a hockey memory that extends all the way back to October of 2006...maybe.

In the whole narrow world of Washington sports on-line today, there was one post that I did love, at Peerless Prognosticator. Sentimental but realistic.

I called it in 2004, even though it turned out not to be a trade and not to be then...this hurts the most. More than any of the overtime losses, more than Detroit carrying the Cup around our ice, more than the strikes and lockouts.

For completely selfish reasons, I hope Kolzig ends up sitting by the pool with the six pack...but if he is in net, I won't feel like a traitor if he shuts us out and I cheer.

Questions without answers

Sometimes there really are situations where neither alternative is good, where the evils are so evils that you can't really find that one is lesser.

I speak, of course, of this.

Good for what ails ya

Rodents in the ceiling? Dog puke on the bed?

I can heartily recommend Big Tattoo Red.

It is entirely probably that I will be loathing life at 5 a.m. tomorrow.

Why I'm not blogging

Because if I were, it would be posts like:

I hate my job, and when I get home from work, I have to clean up the piles of dog puke all over my bed.

The trap is set

We never found the exact location of the hole, so we just filled the area under the porch with expanding foam. Hopefully under the porch wasn't where the critter was spending its days...I have visions of a polyurethane Pompeii.

And the trap is set in the ceiling, with yogies and a water bottle. Of course we put in a water bottle. What if we do trap something and it's in there for twelve hours? Wouldn't want it to get thirsty.

If only it understood...it could have nested in the back yard, knocked on the window when it got hungry, and I'd have delivered grilled cheese sandwiches or waffles. I just can't let something that might chew wires live in the basement ceiling.