The sheer, unadul­tered, WTF crazi­ness that is this week con­tin­ues apace. And it’s only just after­noon on Tues­day. Nor­mally I’d be grouchy as all hell, but I’ve heard so many other rela­tions of grouch­i­ness from friends, fam­ily, cowork­ers and Face­book, that my anthro­po­log­i­cal obser­va­tion mech­a­nisms queued up my con­fir­ma­tion bias and now I’m just fas­ci­nated with what­ever the hell is up with Cleve­land right now.

No one slept well last night, or the night before, except for peo­ple who were drunk or are usu­ally insom­niac. Yes­ter­day, I had to lit­er­ally sit on Abra­ham in order to get him clothed, no one had a good day at work, and a vacant house owned by an absen­tee preda­tory loan scam­mer exploded and dam­aged fifty-five other homes, and dis­placed fif­teen fam­i­lies.

Today I was ver­bally abused by a crazy black woman on the bus who nearly sat on me, and then accused me of try­ing to run her over. She referred to every black per­son as an ani­mal and every white per­son as a dirty human. All at the top of her lungs.

How­ever, I just gave blood and now I’m eat­ing left­over chili and a peanut but­ter sand­wich at home.

The new semes­ter has kicked off and any sem­blance of a hol­i­day has finally left the build­ing. The class I’m tak­ing for the next 4 months is Applied Quan­ti­ta­tive Rea­son­ing. The instruc­tor doesn’t appear to be a hard-ass, but he’s play­ing every­thing exactly by the CSU pol­icy guide. I get the feel­ing because it’s eas­ier for him to let the pol­icy already in place do the work. This class is basi­cally a part-time job; sta­tis­ti­cal math­e­mat­ics for 16 hours per week.

It’s going to be a chal­lenge, but I always rise to those. I’ve not exer­cised my math mus­cles in a decade, so I expect there will be some nec­es­sary cobweb-blowing in the first weeks.

Instead of writ­ing a post about all of the great things that hap­pened in the last decade, I fig­ured the fol­low­ing video is just as eloquent.

I’ve noticed that Obama’s stock turns of phrase appear more and more often on blogs and com­ing from state­ments from other folks all over the place. To doc­u­ment, these are:

• Let’s be clear
• Make no mistake

I don’t believe this is con­fir­ma­tion bias. They’re used in the same rhetor­i­cal con­texts, for the most part. It’s a sub­con­scious sign that the per­son speak­ing or writ­ing has a deep respect for (and very likely looks up to) the President.

Per­son­ally, I like it when he talks about teach­able moments, when he’s deal­ing with thorny but morally impor­tant issues. I don’t know that I always agree with what he defines as a teach­able moment, but I cer­tainly appre­ci­ate the sen­ti­ment that there are times when it is impor­tant to learn a les­son, and to let the moment teach that les­son to you. Your reac­tion to that moment pro­vides some­thing you can teach your­self, and then oth­ers. It’s a good mech­a­nism for thought­ful living.

From what I’ve seen, read and talked about with oth­ers, the con­sen­sus is that the first decade of the new mil­len­nium, the first decade of actual worldly-awareness on my part, sucked. For the most part, I’ve got to agree. Global ter­ror­ism, geno­cide in Africa, two unwinnable wars, Amer­i­cans tor­tur­ing peo­ple, two reces­sions (or eco­nomic down­turns, or bubble-bursts, or what­ever safer word you want to use), and those are just the top 5.

Per­son­ally, the new decade hasn’t started out much bet­ter. On New Year’s Eve, Bram was sick. On New Year’s Day I came down with the same thing and lost 7 pounds in 36 hours, prob­a­bly should have gone to the hos­pi­tal, and spent the next 3 days hob­bling about like an old man. Dur­ing this time Debbie’s brother got what­ever it was. And the babysit­ter, and the babysitter’s hus­band, and another kid she watches, and that kid’s parents.

So Tues­day I feel up to going to work. I put on my dress shirt and lo, a tear in the left elbow. What the hell? What­ever. I put on another dress shirt and lo, a tear in the left elbow. What the fuck? What­ever. I put on a sweater and go to work. While walk­ing to the bus stop, I get a call to find out that my uncle’s father died the night before. He wasn’t blood kin, but he might as well have been. 92 years old, a great and good man, a patri­arch of the 20th century.

So enough of the crap from the last decade.

When I was very small, the worst word I knew was “hate.” I could get smacked for using it too freely or inap­pro­pri­ately. Later, I was taught the typ­i­cal tru­ism “if you can’t say any­thing nice, don’t say any­thing.” Once I’d processed that by being required to sit in a chair and think about man­ners a few times, I then became con­fused about the dif­fer­ence between a com­ment and a com­pli­ment. I under­stood per­fectly well what a com­pli­ment was, but a com­ment was a conun­drum. Appar­ently a com­ment didn’t have to be com­pli­men­tary. So to my tiny binary mind, this cer­tainly meant that com­ments were not some­thing that was good.

It’s tod­dler logic, like the time I asked Mom to name every­thing that began with the let­ter m. Hey, Mom begins with m doesn’t it? She must know every­thing else that begins with m then.

This Christ­mas sea­son I have made:

• 4 batches of Art of Dark­ness Brownies
• 3 batches of chocolate-dipped pret­zel rods
• 12 pounds of fudge (soon to be 16)
• 4 batches of 7-layer bars
• a dozen Best of 2009 CDs

This has been one crazy week. Abraham’s reg­u­lar babysit­ter has been in the hos­pi­tal for over a week now, and he’s been shut­tled all over the place (includ­ing a new tem­po­rary babysit­ter) until DeeDee is back home. I’ve been bak­ing in every spare moment, and work has been hec­tic with last-minute high-priority site build­ing. So. I’m gonna sit back and let Bram type the rest of this post.

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I’ve either got what Bram had, or some­thing from a coworker. Christ­mas shop­ping is fin­ished, though I almost got into a fight at the liquor store buy­ing some­thing as a part of my secret santa gift exchange at work. All that I have left to do is fur­ther bak­ing. Appar­ently, chocolate-dipped pret­zel sticks are a hit with a teething 18-month old and his mother. The first batch I made has disappeared.

We fin­ished up watch­ing the Gor­meng­hast minis­eries last night. It’s based on a fan­tas­tic cou­ple of books by Mervyn Peake (the third book, not so much), and the BBC did an admirable job trans­lat­ing the thick, dusty and some­times delib­er­ately turgid story into 4 hours on screen. Jonathan Rhys Davies is an impres­sive (if far too pretty-looking) Steer­pike, and while Gor­meng­hast cas­tle is the main char­ac­ter in the books, some­thing that is nearly impos­si­ble to trans­late on screen, who­ever did the set design had a keen and inno­v­a­tive eye for com­mu­ni­cat­ing the age, immen­sity and decay of the cas­tle. It appears that all of the actors in the minis­eries had a blast por­tray­ing Peake’s car­i­ca­ture char­ac­ters, who are silly gothic grotesques, one and all.

The bus routes changed over the week­end, so I have to leave the house 20 min­utes ear­lier than usual. Hope­fully my tim­ing won’t be too far off, or else I’ll have to wait a half hour for the next bus.

I had to take the day off of work because Bram has an ear infec­tion. First we had to spend an inter­minable 2.5 hours at Metro­Health, but get­ting his $3 pre­scrip­tion one door down from the pedi­atric clinic was nice. It’s that pink stuff that tastes like bub­ble gum.

Instead of study­ing for my Intro to Pub­lic Admin­stra­tion final, which is tomor­row, I baked. Dark choco­late brown­ies (so dark they look like coal), 7 layer bars, and chocolate-dipped pret­zel rods. So much to do, so lit­tle time left before the holidays.

Prob­a­bly the best rea­son to call for good web stan­dard prac­tices and a con­sis­tent and log­i­cal approach to build­ing web­sites is the ease with which such good plan­ning enables future-proofing and upgrad­ing how a site looks. In 2002, when I started this thing, I was blindly mov­ing about using WYSIWYG, think­ing I knew what CSS was and how RSS worked. Now that I’ve got my head around that, and know how to build lean, seman­tic markup, acknowl­edge the power that tags can have and under­stand first-hand the impor­tance of acces­si­bil­ity in expand­ing the web expe­ri­ence, I often want to go back and clean up all the dusty cor­ners of this site, mak­ing each post pass all of the var­i­ous tests that exist to test webpages.

I’ve been, every once in a moment, when I have a moment, been work­ing on a redesign. HTML5 and CSS3, excel­lent typog­ra­phy and a new iter­a­tion of the min­i­mal design aes­thetic that’s become the norm here. I’ve been work­ing on it for months, but it is still only barely started. It takes more time to fig­ure out where I left off than it does to make changes and updates to the design. It’s the cobbler’s children.

The eas­i­est way to get peo­ple who live in Cleve­land and have a bad opin­ion of Cleve­land to have a bet­ter opin­ion of Cleve­land is to get them to pay atten­tion to dif­fer­ent things, and to pri­or­i­tize that atten­tion. This evening I could have dwelt upon how empty the down­town was, but instead I mar­veled at the Christ­mas lights on Pub­lic Square and thought about the care that some­one took in hang­ing them. It made me remem­ber what the real stars look like.

On the bus home, I could have looked with dis­taste on the mer­cu­r­ial meth-head, but he kept jaw­ing about going home to see his mother, and there was a dad play­ing peek­a­boo with his lit­tle daugh­ter. Her laugh­ter cheered every­one on the bus.

Back when I was full time under­grad I tossed about phrases like “your focus deter­mines your real­ity,” but it’s more mean­ing­ful to say “pay atten­tion and get what you pay for.”

Today was long and fruit­ful. I learned much, but the main thing is some­thing I fig­ured out just now as I fired up the browser to write this post. This last year has been a sub­con­scious seek­ing of new path­ways and chal­lenges. I started two new blogs, joined the W3C, joined Gov­Loop, started the pur­suit of an MPA, found a new tim­bre to my own par­tic­u­lar voice and phi­los­o­phy and just recently decided to get back into the swing of things around here. I broke out of my root ball and made myself stretch into new soil. I’m even up on HTML5 and CSS3, though noth­ing vis­i­ble has come from that yet.

I still have a hard time admit­ting that I’m wrong about things. Thank­fully my rela­tion­ship with Deb­o­rah has helped me be bet­ter at say­ing “I don’t know” in both my pri­vate and pro­fes­sional lives. I’ve got­ten bet­ter at sup­port­ing my own argu­ments and posi­tions, and hope­fully more tact­ful as well. I’d like to think that the result is a more refined and mature ver­sion of myself, but I’m still quite aware of just how far I have to go. Aware­ness of the extent of my faults is another bonus. The take­away from this is that I am a per­son who is going to con­stantly be set­ting myself tasks for learn­ing, teach­ing and growing.

We even got the Christ­mas tree up.

I’ve been neglect­ing this site for quite some time. There are a bunch of rea­sons for this, but none of them are good excuses. I’ve been a busy man, and real life has been keep­ing me bless­edly busy with school, con­fer­ences, hol­i­day travel, hol­i­day shop­ping and col­lab­o­ra­tion with some local folks. When my life rearranged itself a few years ago, I decided to only write when there were impor­tant things to say. When Bram showed up, I told myself I wouldn’t let this place turn into every other weblog of a new parent.

All of which is a betrayal of the main rea­son I started this thing, way back in Jan­u­ary of 2002. To write things down that I thought or thought were impor­tant on a daily basis. As a way to find my voice. Time to get back on track. I’m going to write at least a small post on a daily basis, just like back in the day.

So I went to an ortho­pe­dic guy at Metro­Health to talk about my chronic knee trou­ble. He was the sports med­i­cine ortho­pe­dic guy, a com­pet­i­tive cyclist and triath­lete. We had a good chat. The ini­tial x-rays on my knee showed a good amount of car­ti­lage which was promis­ing news. Dr. Schae­fer still gave me an exam­i­na­tion and told me that my left patella and left ankle were both very loose joints. I agreed with him and told him about my his­tory of turn­ing the ankle and both patel­lar dis­lo­ca­tions. The good news from this is that as I age and my joints stiffen, these joints will become less wig­gly. An “advan­tage” of aging. In the mean­time, I’m to con­tinue rid­ing my bike and being as active as I want, ignor­ing the pain and let­ting any swelling be my guide to over-exertion. More good news.

He decided to take another x-ray from a dif­fer­ent angle, to get a look in between my patella and knee joint. This was done promptly and it was dis­cov­ered that I have a menis­cal ossi­cle, basi­cally a loose chip of bone float­ing around in there. That’s what’s likely been caus­ing my pain. There’s noth­ing to be done apart from try­ing to make my legs even stronger (and going to a phys­i­cal ther­a­pist to get some exer­cises) and start tak­ing glu­cosamine sul­fate (not chon­droitin) to improve my joint health.

I was leery of the glu­cosamine stuff since it costs the earth, but the doc­tor sug­gested I get it from… Wal-Mart. I was even more leery of this, but my knee hurts so much I went shop­ping. At Walgreen’s a two-month sup­ply of 2,000mg glu­cosamine sul­fate would cost me $120. It was about the same at Rite Aid. Tar­get doesn’t carry it. So I went to Wal-Mart. I got a three-month sup­ply of 2,000mg glu­cosamine sul­fate for $13. It was almost worth the near ago­ra­pho­bic melt­down that Wal-Mart engenders.

At the health fair I learned many great things. They are great events that more peo­ple should take advan­tage of. I learned that my BMI says that I’m over­weight (but only just). This is some­thing I’ve known for awhile. I’m stuck at 190–192 and I should really by around 182–185. That’s my com­fort­able weight, and right in the mid­dle in terms of BMI.

I also had my body fat per­cent­age taken, and I’m in the nor­mal range with that. This seems strange, but the expla­na­tion lies in my bike rid­ing. I essen­tially have no fat on my legs at all, and the mus­cles couldn’t get much stronger unless I took up fenc­ing again. Unfor­tu­nately, the way my knee has been act­ing up, I can’t ride my bike (or even walk very far) with­out some chronic aches and pains.

The other half of me sits in a chair all day and is essen­tially wimpy. I asked the nutri­tion­ist at the Health Fair for tips on los­ing the addi­tional 7–10 pounds based on how I’m already behav­ing, and the answer lies, not in reduc­ing my caloric intake (which I try to keep at 1200–1500 calo­ries per day, the rec­om­mended value for the seden­tary) but by switch­ing how I get my calo­ries. Basi­cally, less white carbs, more veg­eta­bles. And upper body cal­is­then­ics. I’ve been told that you can’t do enough sit-ups to burn off the spare tire, but if I cou­ple a good sit-up rou­tine that with 100 push-ups thingy I tried and maybe the 5BX plan, and can be dis­ci­plined enough to keep it up, I should be able to take care of that.

There was also a chi­ro­prac­tor there who put some gizmo on my back to mea­sure my back mus­cle ten­sion. It did a good job, because it reg­is­tered the sore parts of my back. I’d really like a chair with good lum­bar sup­port, but I think it might be a good idea to get a refer­ral to see the back-cracker to get myself realigned. (Although I don’t know enough to know if chi­ro­prac­tors are quacks or not, there’s a ves­ti­gial mem­ory of mine where some­one whose opin­ion I respected held that opinion.)

My life has been extremely great lately. Abra­ham is a per­son now, even though I some­times think we used too many mon­keys when assem­bling him. He is some­one I can inter­act with and play with all the time. I can antic­i­pate the direc­tion he’ll grow and be con­stantly sur­prised by how often I’m right and how often he goes not even the oppo­site way, but a way I never even imag­ined. I’ll be at work and then I’ll think about him and want to hug him. I expect this to con­tinue forever.

The weather has been my favorite kind, I’ve been eat­ing great food and mak­ing home­made dark choco­late and home­made green tea ice cream. I went to the health fair and found out that I’m slightly health­ier than last year. The work on the house is done, and though my bank account is depleted, I get paid three times in October.

Octo­ber means Hal­loween, which means I have to fig­ure out what cos­tume I’m going to wear and what Hal­loween show I’m going to attend. We also might have a fall cookout.

This week­end I get to see my friend Jeremy and his fam­ily, and go to the Notre Dame/Washington game.

There’s some­thing else too, but I can’t seem to remem­ber what it is…

Today was a zoo. Got up early to do some fall clean­ing, just the bed­room today. Fin­ished at 9pm tonight. Upstairs ten­ant moved par­tially out today, roofers tore off and replaced part of the bal­cony roof, gas man came out to ver­ify a leak (or three) in our nat­ural gas line (end result, no gas until some­time Mon­day). Two friends stopped by. Din­ner at Crapplepee’s. Tar­get for a bee­dog cos­tume and cedar blocks. Nev­erend­ing laun­dry. Still wait­ing on fixed gut­ters and glass-blocked base­ment. No ten­ant and grad school pay­ments mean a net -$900 fund­ing switch over last month.

Now I’m off to Now That’s Class for a free dual album release show, where I’ll buy a cas­sette tape I can’t play and a 12″ vinyl that I can.

Once the dust set­tles from the week­end, I think it’s gonna look like I didn’t get paid at all.

A lit­tle bit below this are some good [but some­what too dis­pas­sion­ate] quotes about the field of pub­lic admin­is­tra­tion. I keep wait­ing to read about how the civil ser­vice is ser­vice to the cit­i­zen, but I have a feel­ing I’m going to be read­ing lots more about prag­matic influ­ence wran­gling before I ever get to eth­i­cal and moral codes for pub­lic admin­is­tra­tion. I sure hope some of that exists.

From the his­tory of the field that we’ve cov­ered thus far, it seems that PA styles in prac­tice have been reac­tionary to the needs of the time instead of antic­i­pa­tory. If this is the case, then I believe that this is the rea­son that pub­lic bureau­cracy in Amer­ica gets such a bad rap. Stuff doesn’t get fixed until it’s so bro­ken that every­body notices. Cou­pled with what appears to be a lack of eth­i­cal exam­i­na­tion of the PA process, there seems to be lots of room for improve­ment in both prac­tice and study of PA. Of course, I’ve only been to two classes, and I expect my igno­rance will be remedied.

Who­ever would effect a change in mod­ern con­sti­tu­tional gov­ern­ment must first edu­cate his fellow-citizens to want some change. That done, he must then per­suade them to want the par­tic­u­lar change he wants.  He must first make pub­lic opin­ion will­ing to lis­ten and then see to it that it lis­tens to the right things. He must stir it up to search for an opin­ion, and then man­age to put the right opin­ion in its way.

A truth must become not only plain, but com­mon­place before it will be seen by the peo­ple who go to their work very early in the morn­ing; and not to act upon it must involve great and pinch­ing incon­ve­niences before these same peo­ple will make up their minds to act upon it.

Trust is strength in all rela­tions of life; and, as it is the office of the con­sti­tu­tional reformer to cre­ate con­di­tions of trust­ful­ness, so it is the office of the admin­is­tra­tive orga­nizer to fit admin­is­tra­tion with con­di­tions of clear-cut respon­si­bil­ity which shall insure trustworthiness.

Woodrow Wil­son — The Study of Administration

It is clear that the bureau­cratic orga­ni­za­tion of a social struc­ture, and espe­cially of a polit­i­cal one, can and reg­u­larly does have far-reaching eco­nomic consequences…

The con­se­quences of bureau­cracy depend there­fore upon the direc­tion which the pow­ers using the appa­ra­tus give to it. And very fre­quently a crypto-plutocratic dis­tri­b­u­tion of power has been the result.

In Eng­land, but espe­cially in the United States, party donors reg­u­larly stand behind the bureau­cratic party orga­ni­za­tions. They have financed these par­ties and have been able to influ­ence them to a large extent.

Max Weber — Bureaucracy

You can find any num­ber of per­sonal anec­dotes about the health care in Amer­ica just about any­where in Amer­ica you go. I’m late to the game, but I’ve got a story too. It’s not an out­ra­geous out­lier, or an edge case about just how messed up the health care sys­tem is. There’s too much push­ing toward extrem­ism in what is cur­rently being spun as the health care “debate”. That’s why I decided to write this.

My Story

I have fan­tas­tic health care. I’ve been using the pub­lic, County-run Metro­Health sys­tem since I moved to Cleve­land in 2003. In all of that time, I’ve had noth­ing but excel­lent, com­pas­sion­ate and pro­fes­sional care from the staff at this pub­licly run and tax-payer funded hos­pi­tal and health­care sys­tem. At my old job, I had Kaiser Per­ma­nente as my HMO, and while the care I received from Metro­Health was noth­ing less than amaz­ing, try­ing to get access to that care was an exer­cise in bureac­ro­bat­ics [to port­man­teau a neol­o­gism]. It’s the same story you’ve heard a thou­sand times, long waits, high co-pays, unfriendly staff and poor access.

Now that I work for the County, my health care needs have never been ful­filled in a swifter or more pain­less man­ner. My health care pro­gram is admin­is­tered by Metro­Health, and designed specif­i­cally for County employ­ees. I have a ded­i­cated num­ber I can call for ques­tions and appoint­ments, I’m guar­an­teed an appoint­ment within 3 days, I’ve even seen spe­cial­ists mere hours after hav­ing my GP decide I need to see one. I even get to use the Metro­Health pre­scrip­tion counter instead of hav­ing to drive a half hour to a Kaiser Per­ma­nente approved pharmacy.

If this sounds like a mir­a­cle, you should keep in mind that this is what health care can be like when it is government-driven and tax-payer funded. There is no profit motive. The sys­tem is focused on doing the best job it can, pro­vid­ing qual­ity health care to its citizens.

Debbie’s Story

For awhile, as described in the Tough Times post I put up in March, Deb­bie had no health care.  Not due to any fault of her own, but because her employer’s mal­com­pe­tence resulted in an entire school of teach­ers get­ting laid off. The only afford­able pol­icy she could get her­self basi­cally cov­ered noth­ing, and buy­ing into COBRA is a joke for peo­ple who don’t make much in the first place. She ended up going to Metro­Health and get­ting rated. Since she made so lit­tle, she only had to pay $5 for her care. And she had her health cared for, through a tax-payer funded government-run health care sys­tem. Her new insur­ance doesn’t cover cer­tain med­ical prac­tices and pro­ce­dures due to the reli­gious beliefs of her employer. I make no crit­i­cism of this, since her employer is pay­ing for her health insur­ance. How­ever, a pub­lic option would at least give her a choice.

A choice to use a tax-payer funded, government-run health care sys­tem, like the amaz­ing one in Cleveland.

The Cleve­land Clinic and Uni­ver­sity Hos­pi­tals get a lot of deserved press for the work and research they do into cut­ting edge med­ical pro­ce­dures. Metro­Health deserves just as much praise for the work they do car­ing for and heal­ing the cit­i­zens of Cuya­hoga County.

Address­ing the Crazy

Death Pan­els. Seri­ously? I have a liv­ing will, and I am com­forted by the fact that it requires more than one doc­tor to agree that my chance of recov­ery is hope­less before they pull the plug. A pub­lic option will not result in this:

I think the best way to deal with the peo­ple who are vir­u­lently opposed to a pub­lic option (quite a few of which are mem­bers of my fam­ily), and who are turn­ing the pub­lic option idea into a dis­pro­por­tion­ately ogr­ish fac­sim­ile of the actual law is to:

• Ask them what their solu­tion is. If they have one, get as much detail from them as pos­si­ble. Lis­ten to their solu­tion and ques­tion the areas you find lack­ing, be they moral, eth­i­cal, eco­nomic, polit­i­cal, or pro­ce­dural. You might not con­vince them, but you might con­vince some­one who is lis­ten­ing, and you’ll be bet­ter able con­vince other peo­ple who might not know their ass from a hole in the ground (they could prob­a­bly see a doc­tor for that con­di­tion if they had a pub­lic option).
• Go to Real­ity Check, watch the videos, read the FAQs. When you come across ridicu­lous email for­wards, crazy online rants, etc. reply with actual facts (don’t just link to the site). Noth­ing hurts The Stu­pid™ like the 2x4 of Education™.
• Write any and every Congress-critter, but your own first. Send them your health care life story and ask them to sup­port the pub­lic option.
• Use the patented Give The Stu­pid™ Enough Rope To Hang Itself By Its Own Petard While Rea­soned And Calm Adults Edu­cate And Debate Amongst Them­selves™ method to give The Stu­pid™ enough rope to hang itself by its own petard while rea­soned and calm adults (like the rest of us) edu­cate and debate amongst themselves.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading.

Most of what’s been going on in my life and through my mind lately hasn’t really war­ranted a full post, but here are a few things:

Car­bon Motors & Connersville

For years I gave my home­town, Con­nersville, IN noth­ing but scorn. Prob­a­bly like most teenagers treat their home­town. Now that I’ve a fam­ily of my own, and make more reg­u­lar trips back home, I’ve come to see Con­ner­tucky in a new light. Robert’s Park (and its har­ness rac­ing track), Spar­tan Bowl, and the Con­nersville Coun­try Club in par­tic­u­lar are gems in a county that is smaller in pop­u­la­tion than the neigh­bor­hood I cur­rently live in. It’s a great town, that just hap­pened to have fallen on harder and harder times while I was grow­ing up there. This cul­mi­nated in the clos­ing of a for­mer Ford plant and the lay­offs of 700–800 folks; caus­ing the already high unem­ploy­ment rate to skyrocket.

My town is tough though, and filled with a blue col­lar pride in its rich auto­mo­tive his­tory (the inno­v­a­tive and his­tor­i­cal Cords were assem­bled in Con­nersville). Now the C’ville has fought off the com­pe­ti­tion to reclaim its posi­tion mak­ing inno­v­a­tive auto­mo­biles. Car­bon Motors is com­ing to town. This means jobs and regained self-respect for those folks who were laid off and will now be able to use their exper­tise to feed their fam­i­lies once again.

My new­found under­stand­ing of Con­nersville has helped me fur­ther under­stand why I like Cleve­land so much. As dis­parate as these two places are, the peo­ple have a lot in common.

Com­pound Fest

Com­pound Fest is prob­a­bly my favorite event involv­ing Cleve­land music folks. It’s all day, every­body shows up, tons of local bands, and it’s free!

Ambi­tion

I’ve always thought that ambi­tion is a neg­a­tive trait. I’ve also never con­sid­ered myself that ambi­tious. But lately I’ve real­ized that my desire to con­stantly improve myself, to con­tin­u­ously learn more and to do the best I can at every­thing is its own form of ambi­tion. It isn’t directed toward some­thing exter­nal, like money or power, which is what I usu­ally think of as ambition’s goal. So I guess ambi­tion is like any other tool, its good­ness or bad­ness is deter­mined by how it is used.

Applied Anthro­pol­ogy

When I inter­viewed Ward 15 City Coun­cil­man Brian Cum­mins last week for BLACKHEART Cleve­land, he was excited to find out that I got my degree in anthro­pol­ogy. He men­tioned that he could see where I was apply­ing those skills doing the weblog thing. I’ve not really thought that I’ve been using those stud­ies in daily life, but since then I’ve been try­ing to see if and where else I might be unknow­ingly apply­ing anthropology.

Watch­ing Peaches Ripen

Watch­ing the “To Be Read” Tower Grow

I rented a truck in order to haul back an antique dresser that I picked up at auc­tion in Indi­ana for $150. On the way back from the Inde­pen­dence Day cel­e­bra­tion at my aunt and uncle’s (where I was bequeathed 3 antique chairs), since we already had the truck, we stopped at the Heart of Ohio Antique mall and ended up get­ting a high boy (com­plete with bon­net box) and a blan­ket chest (still smelling of camphor).

This means we can rid our­selves of the rick­ety stuff we had before.

I’ve rarely been busier or more inter­ested in what I’ve been doing lately. I was telling Deb­bie the other day that it is nice to have so many var­ied things to do that in my free time all I want to do is read instead of play­ing video games or some­thing else.

BLACKHEART Cleve­land has been eat­ing up most of my time; try­ing to sched­ule inter­views and rus­tle up good and excit­ing infor­ma­tion. We’re still at the heavy lift­ing stage, but I’ve got a good feel­ing about its direc­tion and longevity. Now I just have to get out, con­duct some inter­views, edit them and get them online. It is nice to have a chance to do film/video work again, even amateurishly.

Through my gov­ern­ment design blog The Design State, I’m work­ing on a weekly video with Gov­Loop where I [and even­tu­ally a few other folks with areas of exper­tise] will answer ques­tions or present, briefly, on a cer­tain topic.

Abra­ham had his belated birth­day party and we’re headed out of town for the week­end. I’ve sched­uled my GRE exam, but haven’t had a chance to study yet. I’m not much wor­ried, though I hope I’m not being too overconfident.

I’ve been in another video as The Face of Solid Waste:

Through­out all of this, Deb­bie has been a champ. I worry that I’m neglect­ing her or my parental duties from time to time, but she said she’d let me know if I was slack­ing in that area. That’s cer­tainly the top priority.

I was invited, along with a bunch of other blog­gers, to live­blog a dress rehearsal of Opera Cleveland’s Fal­staff. Deb­bie is here with me and will be post­ing some updates while I run around like a cer­tain opera chicken with my head cut off tak­ing video and pic­tures. We’ve never been to an opera pro­duc­tion before, and I’m look­ing for­ward to the per­for­mance and the rare behind-the scenes access. Opera Cleve­land is doing some great mar­ket­ing here.

Here are some resources for the production:

• You can watch the dress rehearsal live here.
• Fal­staff program
• Fol­low Carl the Opera Chicken at his blog.
• Some pho­tos of the pro­duc­tion.
• Opera Chicken on Twit­ter (fol­low the hash #oper­a­cleve­land)

6:31PM — True to Shake­spear­ian tra­di­tion, the per­form­ers come to the stage from the audi­ence, and don their cos­tumes in front of every­one. Non of the per­form­ers are miked, so it is impor­tant that they have a pow­er­ful enough voice to fill the 3000 seat State theater.

7:16PM — Here’s the Fal­staff libretto. I can’t record any video because Opera Cleve­land has no agree­ment with the orches­tra to do so. I also just missed a great sil­hou­ette shot. Upload­ing more pics to Flickr as we speak.

7:24PM — Dude Fal­staff is try­ing to get with two girls at once with­out them find­ing out. Nice try. Women aren’t that dumb.

7:30PM — Props back­stage have their own par­tic­u­lar spots:

That’s Valerie, the stage manager:

Dress­ing rooms for the soloists:

7:34PM — All my pho­tos are here. Here’s a shot where you can see the trans­lated libretto up top.

First Intermission.

7:40PM — Deb­bie did a sketch of some of the costumes:

Fal­staff Opera Cleve­land Trivia — circa 150 light­ing cues in the production.

7:53PM — Deb­bie here. Intermission’s over. I just asked the cos­tume guy how the women are able to breathe so loud in appar­ently tight corsets. He tells me that their struc­ture actu­ally sup­ports the lungs and diaphragm from below, mak­ing it eas­ier to sing loud.

7:55PM — Alice has sent a mes­sen­ger to dude Fal­staff telling him to meet her secretly. “But I have another mes­sage for your wor­ship!” Meg’s hus­band is sel­dom home.

8:10PM — Adam here. I just remem­bered that I saw a pro­duc­tion of Die Zauber­flöte when I was in col­lege. So this isn’t my first opera. I really like the spare set-design, lots of plain wood.

More Fal­staff Cleve­land Opera Trivia: The stage area and prosce­nium at the State The­ater are the same size at the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera in NYC.

8:19PM — Scene change! I have a feel­ing this pig is about to make his appearance:

8:26PM — I was wrong. The pig that appeared was Falstaff.

8:34PM — Every­body in this pro­duc­tion is obsessed with who is doing or try­ing to do whomever. The stage is full of peo­ple. And the plot just thick­ened! About damn time Verdi/Shakespeare.

8:46PM — Sec­ond Inter­mis­sion is almost over. Finally got a good sil­hou­ette shot.

8:59PM — Looks like most of the action is on Twit­ter, but I found Kevin Cronin’s post about this at RealNEO.

9:05PM — I just real­ized that every tweet I send is also end­ing up as my Face­book sta­tus. Woops.

9:21PM — This pro­duc­tion has some nice deep notes to it. A tapes­try of a nymph being chased by a satyr was very apro­pos, and hav­ing Fal­staff wear horns at Herne’s Oak makes a dou­ble point about cuck­oldry and masculinity.

9:26PM — The baby-sitter alarm is about to go off, so I’m going to wrap this up. This pro­duc­tion was great fun to watch, with just the right amount of orna­ment, cos­tum­ing and set design to make a non-opera afi­cionado enjoy them­selves. The plot is fairly light and comedic, the singing has been out­stand­ing as far as I can tell, and the end­ing appears to be wrap­ping up quite nicely. The stuffed pig finally made its appear­ance too. I had a great time. If you decide to come on down to watch it your­self, I’m sure you will to.

Plus. the cast gets fairly close to naked at the end of the production.

I’ve been very busy lately over at The Design State, and swim­ming around the eGov­ern­ment, Gov 2.0 web. Keep­ing in the Gov­Loop. Today I became an Invited Expert on the W3C’s eGov­ern­ment Inter­est Group. I’m try­ing to expand my exper­tise in my field, and talk­ing with peers from around the globe on how they are imple­ment­ing or try­ing to imple­ment social media and other en vogue appli­ca­tions into their gov­ern­ment web strat­egy is very ful­fill­ing; espe­cially when it is so hard to find some­one locally who’s on the same page as I am, or inter­ested in read­ing the same book for that matter.

When I spoke at the West­side Lead­er­ship Col­lab­o­ra­tive a few weeks ago I was asked to put together a lit­tle guide for com­mu­nity folks to use for set­ting up their own com­mu­nity web pres­ence. I fin­ished it up tonight and though it is still rough, I hope it will help more non-technical folks gain the con­fi­dence to cre­ate some swim­ming holes of their own. That’s why I called it Waterwings.

I’ve been doing other stuff online as well. At one point I had a line on 7 dif­fer­ent web-related projects, but I’ve not heard back from most of the peo­ple in weeks, if not months. That’s the way things usu­ally end up for me. I do feel like I’m get­ting caught up and set­tled in on the work I’m try­ing to accom­plish. I’m hop­ing to tie up a few more loose ends before I leave for Canada in three weeks. Those fish bet­ter watch out.

This is the sec­ond video we’ve shot at my house for a County agency. I’m in this one instead of my offspring.

We’re shoot­ing another video for the Solid Waste Dis­trict tomor­row, for their twice-annual House­hold Haz­ardous Waste round-up. My mug will be in that one too.

One of my cowork­ers dubbed me The Face of Solid Waste.

The last cou­ple of days have been great. Good weather after a seem­ingly end­less win­ter does that, I guess. Fri­day I got to work from home for the major­ity of the day since we were shoot­ing a video for the Solid Waste Dis­trict about the proper ways to dis­pose of latex paint. The night before, my new neigh­bor needed to bor­row some elec­tric­ity and ended up giv­ing me a whole bunch of ancient paint to use for the PSA. The labels on the cans are pretty cool:

The shoot went well and I ended up hav­ing to bust ass back to work in order to give a pre­sen­ta­tion to a bunch of folks about using our Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem. Slept with the heat off and the win­dow open for the first time in seven months.

This morn­ing Abra­ham woke us up at 6:30 and after he’d had a bit to drink we watched the sun­rise and learned about out­side. He loves touch­ing trees and look­ing at how huge they are. He doesn’t like grass; it is too prickly.

I spent most of the day shirt­less in the back­yard. I tore up a cou­ple of peach trees using my bare hands:

I also cleaned out the shed, turned the soil over my tiny gar­den, and got every­thing planted. The all-tomatoes-all-the-time patch last sum­mer has been reduced to two plants. The rest of the space is occu­pied by a bell pep­per, basil, chives, oregano and cilantro.

I had beans & rice for din­ner on the porch, and after the lit­tle guy goes down for the night, I’m going to eat some chocolate-peanut-butter ice cream on the porch.

My porch still needs a rail-mounted beer-bottle opener. Speak­ing of that, here’s a list of other things that I need to do around the house (in no par­tic­u­lar order):

• Remodel Kitchen
• Till & resow backyard
• Dig up one more peach tree and replace it with some­thing that will pro­vide shade
• Replace rot­ten siding
• New gut­ters
• Paint the exte­rior of the house
• Fin­ish bathroom
• Get cov­ers on roof & chim­ney & get the flash­ing checked out.
• Fix base­ment plumbing
• Get a cover for the AC & get it hooked back up to the furnace.
• Get new screen doors
• Refin­ish front door
• Bring wiring up to code
• New win­dows
• Doors rehung

I was inter­viewed by CNN Money about the fed­eral stim­u­lus track­ing site Recovery.gov. I wrote a more detailed post about it over at The Design State.

I would also like to take this oppor­tu­nity to state offi­cially, and unequiv­o­cally, that I love squirrels.

• I went for a run for the first time in a dog’s age today. Put in a lit­tle over 3.5 miles at 11 min­utes a mile. Not so good, but not that bad for a 28 year old with an arthritic knee, a 9 month old, and a year plus of mostly seden­tary liv­ing. My knee hurts, but the weather is beautiful.
• What the hell, man. When I come to the cash reg­is­ter to pur­chase my item, all I want to do is exchange money for prod­uct and get the hell out of your store. I do not:
  1. have the store credit card;
  2. want the store credit card;
  3. and will not give you my phone number/zip code;
  4. want to search around for another item that will enable me to save $5 while spend­ing $10 more; and
  5. care about the cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion sur­vey that I can fill out online or by phone that will enable me to get an addi­tional 10% off my pur­chase of $50 or more within the next five days.
• Went to a show at Now That’s Class. Wish­ing the hip hop scene was big­ger or more eas­ily acces­si­ble, not sure which it needs to be.
• I was excited that the generic brand of instant oat­meal was on super sale.
• I’m plan­ning on build­ing a road bike again this sum­mer, hope­fully I’ll actu­ally get to do it. The first order of busi­ness is find­ing a 62-64cm early-80s steel frame from the Ohio City Bike Coop. Some­how I don’t think a frame that size is going to be easy to come by.

Let me open my big bag of geek here for a sec­ond. I always pre­ferred Star Wars to Star Trek, but Deb­bie is a Trekkie, so when I decided to watch every episode of MST3K, she coun­tered with a request to watch all ten of the Star Trek movies. I groaned, but agreed. Deb­bie was orig­i­nally a fan of The Next Gen­er­a­tion, but watch­ing the movies con­verted her. The orig­i­nal series char­ac­ters are more com­pelling, with more agency, and more inter­est­ing adven­tures than the later films, some of which just seem like stretched tele­vi­sion episodes.

I read some of David Brin’s crit­i­cism of Star Wars around this time as well. It turns out that I’ve grown up enough to really enjoy orig­i­nal series Star Trek. Star Wars is easy for a child to appre­ci­ate, but the Star Trek uni­verse demands a more mature under­stand­ing of the way life works for full appre­ci­a­tion. After watch­ing all of the films, and forc­ing Deb­bie to watch Trekkies and Trekkies 2, I went ahead and started scroung­ing Orig­i­nal Series episodes. So far we’ve seen two; the pilot episode [sans Cap­tain Kirk, but with Spock] and “Where No Man Has Gone Before” in which a cou­ple of the ship­mates basi­cally turn into Jedi/Sith, com­plete with telekine­sis and Force light­ning. In 1966, mind you.

I’m lik­ing that the char­ac­ters have back­sto­ries, have to wres­tle with the emo­tional con­se­quences of their deci­sions, and have their inner weak­nesses thrown at them in every episode. It’s meaty, and kind of makes me want to see the new Star Trek flick com­ing out this summer.

This may come as a sur­prise, but I’m a bit of a pole-in-the-ass orga­niz­ing nazi. I’ve spent over the last year slowly tag­ging my music col­lec­tion. Way back in the day I used RealJuke­box as my media player of choice, it was basi­cally iTunes before iTunes existed. The thing I liked best about RealJuke­box was the abil­ity to give rat­ings to the songs you liked and build playlists that paid atten­tion to those rankings.

Yes­ter­day I man­aged to fin­ish rat­ing every song in my library and can just let my smart playlists deter­mine what gets shunted over onto my shuf­fle. I still need to get the release year for many of the songs, and the lyrics for all of them added, but thank­fully I have a pro­gram that will do most of that for me.

My dig­i­tal music col­lec­tion is in tip-top shape, I ended up delet­ing much of my Bowie col­lec­tion, I still have the discs, but the only stuff I ever lis­ten to is Ziggy Stardust/Diamond Dogs era. Now all I need to do is track down a good record player and get some decent speak­ers for my phys­i­cal music col­lec­tion. Too bad Play it Again Sam closed down.

I’ve decided to use Twit­ter for my own nefar­i­ous pur­poses. I’ve never really liked the looks of the thing, and it seems incred­i­bly bor­ing viewed from the most com­mon uses in which I’ve seen it imple­mented. It has also resulted in peo­ple refer­ring to other peo­ple in com­ments using the @ sym­bol, which is mind-bogglingly annoy­ing. How­ever, like all things Inter­net, it con­tains the pos­si­bil­ity to be gamed, and though I don’t pos­sess the req­ui­site malev­o­lence to truly attempt to game it, I’m just gonna do my own thing [which I’m sure isn’t even orig­i­nal, though I haven’t even checked that]. Blind­ers are nice. I just wish I had less than 140 char­ac­ters to work with.

At this point, I don’t believe that I’m going to fol­low any­one on Twit­ter. I’m just going to post one line a day using my dash­board wid­get and oth­er­wise pre­tend that I’m not using Twit­ter at all. Instead, I’ll see the results of my exper­i­ment in the footer of my weblog. [The plu­gin of which appears to not quite be work­ing exactly well].

A few months ago I shelled out for a flat-screen LCD. It is more energy effi­cient than my old CRT and much nicer for watch­ing movies, which is almost all that we use it for. We also use it to play games on my orig­i­nal NES. Unfor­tu­nately, as I just recently dis­cov­ered, I can’t use the light gun with this TV. Hogan’s Alley and Duck Hunt don’t work, because the LCD screen isn’t made of glass, and there­fore won’t reflect the light back into the gun in such a way that my NES can fig­ure out if I shot the duck or not. Alas.

Ever since I found out that Abra­ham was incom­ing, I’ve not worked out. First, I broke my elbow and big toe, then my mem­ber­ship at the gym ran out, then the weather turned nice right when Abra­ham showed up. I’ve put on about 15 pounds that I need to take off. Car­dio and less gorg­ing are the only ways I’m going to get the weight off. This is going to be hard, since I like to cook and the women I work with bring in deli­cious chow on a reg­u­lar basis.

When I was doing my weightlift­ing, I didn’t notice too much improve­ment in my upper body mus­cle tone, so I’m aim­ing to improve that by putting myself through the 100 push-ups meme. I’m shop­ping around for a good ab and lower-back cales­then­ics rou­tine, but haven’t found one that doesn’t seem like it is more mar­ket­ing than effec­tive­ness. Basic train­ing. I’m not expect­ing to get a six-pack, since that involves get­ting my body fat down to 5–6%.

I’m a bit odd-shaped. My legs are carved from wood due to 15 years of near con­stant run­ning, fenc­ing or cycling, but from the waist up I look like some dude who sits in an office chair all day eat­ing donuts. It’s a shame I can’t run out­doors in the Cleve­land win­ter, but my marathon train­ing from a few years back has taught me that run­ning in Cleve­land win­ters ruins my arthritic knee. I don’t really want to drop cash money at a gym just for tread­mill use.

It is nice to be back home in Cleve­land. I spent a week back in my old Indi­ana stomp­ing grounds; mainly eat­ing and vis­it­ing with my fam­ily. Christ­mas itself was excel­lent, even though I only man­aged to scrape together 2 hours of sleep after mid­night mass. The grand­par­ents and any­one who was on our Christ­mas card list received this photo:

which was taken by my friend and coworker Greg Wil­son a few months back. He’s a great photographer.

My fudge turned out to be the best ever this year. I think I’ve finally fig­ured out the proper pro­por­tions of ingre­di­ents to use, and the best way to let it set. I used a 5# bag of sugar doing my hol­i­day bak­ing. In the realm of presents I received an ani­ma­tronic chip­munk, $20 of assorted instant oat­meal pack­ets, a toaster oven, a go set, and some slip­pers. I gave Deb­bie a 3# jar of but­tons, a red cardi­gan, and a wal­let which was part of a run­ning gag we have.

Abra­ham received a mobile com­mand sta­tion. I’m off until the 5th, time which will be spent fix­ing the kitchen sink [bad sup­ply lines], doing some addi­tional weath­er­proof­ing [using my new home repair book] and devot­ing some much needed time to catch­ing up with friends and Design State.

I killed Tremon­ter tonight. It was a good exper­i­ment, and taught me a lot about the neigh­bor­hood. Through it, I met a bunch of won­der­ful neigh­bor­hood peo­ple and another bunch of won­der­ful Cleve­land peo­ple. Through it, I became part of the Cleve­land Foundation’s Neigh­bor­hood Con­nec­tions Grant Com­mit­tee, and was sent to some neigh­bor­hood lead­er­ship train­ing in Nashville. Through that, in con­junc­tion with some other folks from Cleve­land, I helped put together a Cleve­land Youth Sum­mit at City Hall. Because of Tremon­ter, I was threat­ened with a law­suit, threat­ened with phys­i­cal vio­lence, told I was racist, and told I was a cor­po­rate shill. Good times.

For the first year or so, the site just con­sisted of me post­ing things I found online that had to do with my neigh­bor­hood, busi­nesses, local weblogs, local artists, art gal­leries, events. Even­tu­ally the read­er­ship was high enough that strangers started com­ing up to me and telling me how great the site was.

Then I opened the site up for any­one to post, which is prob­a­bly why I now have gray hairs. At first it was still shiny, happy peo­ple hold­ing hands, but then folks started show­ing up and forc­ing their agen­das all over the place, in your face. Names were called, feel­ings hurt, and new rules had to be put in place. About the time I raised money for two more years of host­ing by putting ads from local busi­nesses on the site [some­thing like $30 for a year of adver­tis­ing], I started get­ting emails from peo­ple who were try­ing to fig­ure out why they were being attacked by com­plete [to them] anony­mous strangers on my site. At first I tried to explain, but more and more often I had to read emails that were from peo­ple who were telling me that they could no longer visit Tremon­ter because the tone was now so antagonistic.

The com­pli­ments about the site became less fre­quent, and then stopped alto­gether. Users threw my rules back in my face and were shocked when they were pun­ished for it. Folks started reg­is­ter­ing mul­ti­ple accounts under anony­mous names and post­ing pos­i­tive things again. For a bit, this gave me hope, new, pos­i­tive blood, until I found out that it was actu­ally the case and had to put my foot down.

For the last year, the site has been noth­ing but an endur­ing headache. The only emails I get now are from peo­ple who have com­plaints about the peo­ple using the site, or com­plaints about the site from peo­ple who are using it. I no longer derive any per­sonal ben­e­fit from Tremon­ter. It has been that way for awhile, I’ve kept Tremon­ter open for longer than I should have, out of a sense of respon­si­bil­ity for what had become an impor­tant news and gos­sip source for the neighborhood.

I con­sid­ered burn­ing the cur­rent incar­na­tion of Tremon­ter and reset­ting it as a picked-author neigh­bor­hood ‘zine, and even bounced the idea off of a few trusted folks. Then I tried to fig­ure out just how long it would take me to get all of that set up. Then I received a few more emails from peo­ple who were very polite, and not con­de­scend­ing in the least, but were once again hurt by being attacked by strangers on the Inter­net. I let this hap­pen, time and time again, in my house. I can no longer apply any sort of moral rel­a­tiv­ity to the sit­u­a­tion. I never liked the movie Old Yeller, but if your dog goes rabid, you put it down yourself.

I have a whole host of other projects that I’d like to work on, the most impor­tant being Abra­ham. With the weight of Tremon­ter off my back, maybe I can actu­ally get the chance to work on one or two more.

I’ve started a new project called The Design State. It’s a weblog about gov­ern­ment web design. I decided to start this up after attend­ing An Event Apart. Much like Tremon­ter was started to edu­cate me about the neigh­bor­hood I live in, The Design State is also meant to be auto­di­dac­tic. There is no dearth of infor­ma­tion out there about what gov­ern­ment design needs to be, but it is almost impos­si­ble to find some­one who is pars­ing out exactly what all of these pro­grams and stan­dards and bench­marks and goals actu­ally mean.

That’s what I’m going to try to do.

Today I voted at the BOE. Let me tell you, they are pre­pared. You should go vote early if you haven’t already. There are two large rooms full of peo­ple eager to make vot­ing as easy as pos­si­ble. It looks like there are a cou­ple hun­dred avail­able vot­ing booths. The longest part of the process was mak­ing my way through the 4 page bal­lot. The issue lan­guage for the City of Cleve­land char­ter amend­ments is a bit dense, so I encour­age you to do your home­work before going in, so you can fill out the bal­lot quickly.

Judge 4 Your­self can help with choos­ing among the judge races.
Here’s a link to the PDF of the mailer that Cleve­land Coun­cil sent out about the pro­posed char­ter amendments.

That about takes care of the hard stuff to learn about in regard to this year’s elec­tion. The state amend­ments are clearly explained and fairly easy to find more about online.

Take it seri­ously! Go Vote! It’s the most impor­tant civic activ­ity that you can par­tic­i­pate in.

While I was in Chicago, a cou­ple of the guys from 538 rolled through Cleve­land. Awhile ago, when they started their On The Road series, I sent Sean and Nate an email ask­ing them to let me know if they needed any help if they came to town. They didn’t spend a day in Cleve­land like they have been else­where, but they did spend the night in my upstairs apart­ment. They’re trav­el­ing around on a shoe­string (they had to bust on down to Appalachia-Ohio yes­ter­day to catch up with Joe Biden) and doing good work, so I was happy to help out, even in absen­tia.

This is the sec­ond time this has hap­pened to me. In early June of 2007, Divi­sion of Planes, a band with a mem­ber who is also a mem­ber of MetaFil­ter, came out to Cleve­land for a show, and had a good turnout. I scored a free copy of their EP because of it, but hap­pened to be in Canada while they played at Now That’s Class. One of these days I’ll make sure to be in town when I invite peo­ple to come visit.

With the stock mar­ket act­ing like a bead of grease on a hot grid­dle, lots of folks have been talk­ing about how the incom­ing 401k reports are going to affect the elec­tion. I don’t have a 401k; since I’m a pub­lic employee, my pen­sion is man­aged by OPERS. I haven’t got­ten that state­ment yet, but the state­ment for my deferred com­pen­sa­tion plan, an addi­tional, vol­un­tary, pre-tax retire­ment option came in the mail today.

A nice thing about this plan is that I can go in daily and make changes to how my money is invested. I’ve done this a few times over the last year as the grease griddle-hopped in the stock mar­ket. Since I started the plan, I’ve done noth­ing but lose money. Even as I moved the invest­ments into more and more con­ser­v­a­tive port­fo­lios, I’ve lost more and more. The last state­ment indi­cates that 55% of the money that was taken out of my pay­check this last quar­ter and invested in my deferred com­pen­sa­tion plan has been lost. I’ve lost 17% of the total money invested since July of 2007.

So I log on to stop addi­tional defer­rals and find out that in the last week, I’ve lost an addi­tional 11% in the value, bring­ing the total loss in one year to 28%.

That’s some seri­ous shit. Espe­cially since my invest­ments are diver­si­fied among the most con­ser­v­a­tive invest­ment port­fo­lios that they offer. No more addi­tional defer­rals until what’s cur­rently in there starts earn­ing money. I basi­cally gave that cash to some­one else to throw away. I’d much rather throw it away myself, or just let it pile up in my sav­ings account, which, at least, is FDIC insured.

I won­der how much worse my OPERS pen­sion plan is going to be.

I’ve been think­ing about writ­ing this post for a long time. The power is out at work today, so I’m unex­pect­edly home with some time on my hands.

My fam­ily, for the most part, and most vocally my uncles, are staunch Catholic Repub­li­cans, and have been for as long as I can remem­ber. I was dig­ging through my but­ton col­lec­tion the other day and I came across a cou­ple of Bush I but­tons from back in the 80s [and an “I sup­port Desert Storm” one, too]. Despite all of this, I grew up rel­a­tively obliv­i­ous to par­ti­san pol­i­tics. Sure, I absorbed, and still believe in much of what old-school small-c con­ser­v­a­tive folks believe in, but I’ve never iden­ti­fied with either party machine. I usu­ally tell peo­ple, if pressed, that I’m a fis­cal con­ser­v­a­tive and a social liberal.

Once I hit 18 and got my fran­chise, I started pay­ing atten­tion. The first thing I noticed was that when­ever pol­i­tics came up at fam­ily gath­er­ings, the lib­eral side was always the one under attack. This con­fused me, because as far as I could tell, lib­eral pol­i­tics are the most in line with the teach­ings of Jesus. I couldn’t under­stand how my won­der­ful, Catholic fam­ily could deride pol­i­tics that seem to mesh to eas­ily with most of Catholi­cisms teachings.

I’ve never been one to blindly fol­low a crowd; I spent 4 years at one of the most rabidly con­formist and tradition-loving uni­ver­si­ties in the nation. I’d ini­tially bought in to the Notre Dame dream, but the real­ity I found there was at odds with their mar­ket­ing. That’s the same thing I noticed with my fam­ily, they seemed to have bought what Repub­li­cans are mar­ket­ing, with­out pay­ing atten­tion to the prod­uct they actu­ally got.

In the 2000 elec­tion, my grand­mother said she couldn’t vote for Gore/Lieberman, because she couldn’t bring her­self to vote for a Jew. I’m sure if she were still alive that she’d say that she couldn’t vote for Obama because of a sim­i­lar rea­son. She would always vehe­mently deny this racism when called on it, and I’m sure she wasn’t con­sciously racist, just a prod­uct of her time.

As the 2004 elec­tion rolled around, one of my uncles said that he no longer bought Grey Goose vodka, because France didn’t sup­port us in the war in Iraq, and that he didn’t buy Coors beer because they sup­ported gay mar­riage. This sounded very irra­tional to me.

Now that the 2008 elec­tion is here, I have one uncle whose reli­gious beliefs keep him from vot­ing, yet who nev­er­the­less has noth­ing good to say about Demo­c­ra­tic pol­icy, most specif­i­cally health­care, and another who thinks Sarah Palin is a great VP pick because she’s con­ser­v­a­tive, young and a woman. The only cri­te­rion that he said was miss­ing was that she be black. When pressed about why the VP pick needed to have those qual­i­fi­ca­tions he said so that the GOP could beat the Democ­rats. Moments later he derided career politi­cians for their will­ing­ness to do any­thing to get elected.

This con­tin­u­ing pat­tern of cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance amazes me. I would kill for my fam­ily, they are the great­est peo­ple in my life, but when­ever pol­i­tics comes up, it is like I enter bizarro-world. I hold out hope for my mom. She said, with a note of “Is it okay to feel this way?” in her voice, that watch­ing the Demo­c­ra­tic con­ven­tion inspired her. Still, instead of bas­ing her choice on the issues, she turns off the sound and votes for whomever’s body lan­guage seems the most genuine.

I really don’t care who any­body votes for. What I care about is the man­ner in which peo­ple make their choice. Blindly fol­low­ing a party-line or mak­ing a choice based on some intan­gi­ble is quite fright­en­ing to me because it shows a fun­da­men­tal dis­re­spect for the priv­i­lege of hav­ing a vote. Slightly bet­ter, but still fairly irre­spon­si­ble is bas­ing a vote on what a can­di­date will promise, but not exam­in­ing their abil­ity to accom­plish those promises, or, after elected if they ever actu­ally deliver on them.

So now we get to why I’m choos­ing to vote for whom. As a fis­cal con­ser­v­a­tive, I want the gov­ern­ment to be good stew­ards of my tax dol­lars. I want to trust them to spend this money in a rea­son­able and respon­si­ble way. I expect them to not spend more money than they have and to use tax dol­lars to improve the qual­ity of life for Amer­i­cans by fund­ing edu­ca­tion, health and human ser­vices, job train­ing, etc. The Repub­li­cans have been con­sis­tently fail­ing at this for as long as I’ve been alive. Rea­gan, Bush I and Bush II all cre­ated huge debts pour­ing money into the Depart­ment of Defense and stu­pid wars in the Mid­dle East. That is not good stew­ard­ship of my tax dol­lars, despite the fact that the GOP claims to be fis­cally conservative.

As a social lib­eral, I believe that the gov­ern­ment should keep its nose out of my pri­vate life. More lib­er­tar­ian than lib­eral, pos­si­bly. I believe the gov­ern­ment has no place ban­ning same-sex mar­riage or restrict­ing access to health care options [abor­tion, con­tra­cep­tives, sex edu­ca­tion, stem-cell research, etc.]. I am per­son­ally opposed to abor­tions of con­ve­nience because I feel that if you’re out there hav­ing sex, you should take respon­si­bil­ity for play­ing that lot­tery and know­ing what the out­comes could be, but I also know that my opin­ion on the mat­ter is irrel­e­vant, since I can’t have an abor­tion. That’s a choice the preg­nant woman has to make; a choice that I will sup­port even if I dis­agree with it. The GOP has its nose in all of those things.

So that’s why I’m not vot­ing for the GOP. Why am I vot­ing for Barack Obama? I am vot­ing for Barack Obama because he advo­cates for and encour­ages cit­i­zens take respon­si­bil­ity for their gov­er­nance. His stances on var­i­ous issues are mea­sured, nuanced posi­tions that indi­cate a sin­cere exam­i­na­tion of what he thinks will be best for the coun­try. He refuses to play the mar­ket­ing three-card monte game, and instead is play­ing pol­i­tics the way it should always be played, with respect, can­dor and sin­cer­ity to all par­ties involved. This in turn shows that he respects the sta­tus of the Office for which he is run­ning. I’ve yet to see any of that from John McCain.

Now if only I could get a yard sign.

So appar­ently the Toad­ies are back together sans Lisa Umbarger on bass. They had a new album called No Deliv­er­ance come out on August 19, and they are going to play the Grog Shop on on Octo­ber 15. I am so there. The first and last time I saw them was right before their breakup, I was in the front row of Bogart’s in Cincin­nati with my best buds from high school and I sang along to every song. We waited out back for them to show after the set, and I got their autographs.

The only ques­tion regard­ing this upcom­ing show is whether I finally suc­cumb and be That Guy™ in my orig­i­nal Toad­ies t-shirt, or I wear my tra­di­tional The Bosses You Lose and see if Reznicek remem­bers it from 8 years ago, when he asked me about it after won­der­ing what the fuck it meant dur­ing their set.

Abra­ham now makes big frowny faces for about three sec­onds imme­di­ately after I smooch him.

I man­aged to get sea­son tick­ets to the Notre Dame home games this year. This year it also looks like I won’t be able to go to any of them. Hav­ing a five-month old and lim­ited child-care options will do that to you. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to enter the lot­tery, even with my Mono­gram Club mem­ber­ship. Mem­ber­ship dues for alumni who’ve been grad­u­ated for over seven years went up to $300 a year.

I tried to share my Pitt tick­ets with my friend Chas, but his grand­mother is hav­ing her 90th birth­day cel­e­bra­tion that week­end. My alumni friend Liam didn’t have time to enter the alumni lot­tery this year, but he wants the tick­ets to the Pitt game to meet up with some other alumni friends.

The rest of the tick­ets are going to my uncle. Corbin is prob­a­bly the biggest ND fan in the fam­ily, and he sub­si­dizes my ticket order­ing [which amounted to $800 this year]. I really only ever want to go to one home game per year, so he always takes the rest of what­ever I get. He laid dibs on the Michi­gan tick­ets right away.

Basi­cally I jumped through all the hoops that I usu­ally do, but don’t get a pay­off this year. No vaca­tion, no ND foot­ball game, its a good thing I have a baby to play with.

A wannabe Travis Bickle in a green-colored van-taxi tried to kill me on my ride home from work today. It tried to squeeze me off of the road three times, the last time it cut me off, slammed on its brakes, and went up on the curb. Apart from bless­ing him with a few choice words and the ubiq­ui­tous hand bene­dic­tion, and thereby amus­ing the hell out of a car­ful of peo­ple in the other lane, there wasn’t much I could do. I was too busy try­ing not to crash to get the num­ber of the cab, or even the cab company’s name. So if you know which cab com­pany dri­ves for­est green vehi­cles, let me know. I’d like to give their man­age­ment a piece of my mind too, since they almost got a lot more than a pound of my flesh.

With all of the stuff I’ve been up to lately, doing a bit of writ­ing has fallen by the way­side. Work on the house is still incom­plete, but has slowed down because what remains isn’t crit­i­cal quite yet. Once all of the paint­ing is com­plete, and I’ve man­aged to get all of the doors rehung, there will be pictures.

I’ve gone to see The Dark Knight, which was the first time since Abra­ham graced us with his pres­ence that Deb­bie and I man­aged to get out alone. I went to the zoo, where the boy and I became an exhibit to all of the women around when Deb­bie went to the restroom. I went to Whiskey Island on Fri­day after­noon for a pic­nic, took a walk by myself to get some alone time with nature, watched swal­low bug-catching, a swallow-heckling ori­ole, and played with a ground­hog for a lit­tle while.

Last Mon­day my office was one of the three County offices raided by the FBI and IRS-CID as a part of their inves­ti­ga­tion into cor­rup­tion by County offi­cials. Appar­ently they came over the inter­com and told folks to go to the can­teen [which is what every­where else is called a lunch room]. The design room keeps the over­head speaker turned off because we’d rather not lis­ten to the best in soft rock from the 80s, 90s and now, so I didn’t hear the announce­ment. I hap­pened to be both on my com­puter and on the phone, both no-nos, when the FBI knocked on the door. I’d already man­aged to tell Deb­bie every­thing she needed to know to get the scan­ner at home work­ing though, so it was no big deal.

I went to the can­teen, where every­one else was, and filled out a sheet that asked for basic infor­ma­tion and job duties, and then got to take the rest of the day off.

When my mom rolled up here for the 4th of July, we planted a tree for Abra­ham. I had a tree planted for me when I was born as well. I even wrote about it for Young Authors, so you can read that here. Although that pic­ture is from a month ago, Abra­ham is already much big­ger, I’d say near 12 pounds. He’s started smil­ing and chuck­ling a lit­tle, and I can actu­ally sort of play with him now. The only rough part is that when I’m at work he’s in his best mood, so when I come home I get to inter­act with him for the part of the day when he’s at his worst. It gets frus­trat­ing at times.

I got sea­son tick­ets to the Notre Dame foot­ball games this year, blessed be my mono­gram. I don’t know that I’ll be able to get to more than one of them, however.

The weather has been won­der­ful, and today looks as if it will con­tinue that pat­tern. Din­ner is a daily choice between eat­ing on the porch or watch­ing some old school Mup­pet Show episodes. I recently dis­cov­ered that I can get Mr. Wiz­ard on DVD as well. Abraham’s going to talk to folks at school about these crazy shows that aren’t on TV any­more and no-one is going to know what he’s talk­ing about except his teachers.

I haven’t been to a rock and roll show in for­ever. It hurts.

The most com­mon semi-smarmy ques­tion I get about rid­ing my bike to work is: “How many MPG do you get with that thing?” So I decided to do more bike math. There are 2080 calo­ries in one gal­lon of 2% milk. Using the calo­ries burned count from last year [220 calo­ries per day [6.6 miles per day]] I get 62.7 miles per gal­lon of milk while rid­ing my bike.

2080/220 = 9.454545

9.5 days * 6.6 miles per day = 62.7 mpg.

If the aver­age cost of milk is $3.50 a gal­lon, it costs me a lit­tle more than 5 ¢ per mile.

3.5/62.7 = 0.0558 $ per mile.

So the next time some­one asks, I’ll tell them that I get 62.7 mpg of milk which is about 5¢ per mile; and secure my nerd­dom for all time.

While my Mon­goose gets me too and from work depend­ably, the thing is so heavy and bulky that rid­ing it into the wind is a real bitch, espe­cially since I can’t even pre­tend to ride the thing in an aero­dy­namic fash­ion, it’s a mountain/road hybrid after all.

When I was a kid I had a sweet bike, with a big fat back tire that was per­fect for lay­ing a nice thick piece of rub­ber down when I skid­ded out. The only prob­lem was that it was red, white and blue, and not a very aes­thet­i­cally pleas­ing design either. So I took the thing apart, painted it black and sil­ver, wrote a name I’ve since for­got­ten on the top tube, and basi­cally pimped it out for an 8–10 year old.

Now I want to do the same, but this time I want to build my own road bike. This biggest obsta­cle to this project is that I’m no bike geek; I don’t know what brand of frame to look for, who makes good rims, gears, shifters, brakes, etc. The learn­ing curve will be kind of steep if I’m to get any­where with this. The biggest help for this will be the few folks I know who are hard­core cyclists; Lou, Jeff and Andy, I’ll be on y’all like Mama Cass on a ham sand­wich about this, once I’ve got the ren­o­va­tions under control.

I’m tak­ing Basics of Pro­gram­ming; Intro to ASP.Net; Intro to SQL and JavaScript classes this sum­mer. So far I’ve had one each of ASP.Net and SQL. I’ve learned a bit about ASP.Net pro­gram­ming through hav­ing to mess with the code of the County’s CMS and tweak­ing what the devel­op­ers pro­vide me, but the class is help­ing me under­stand the gestalt much bet­ter. The SQL class is a blast. I com­pletely under­stand every­thing that has been cov­ered so far.

The only down­side to these classes is the tim­ing. Some are at night from 6–9, which eats up a whole day includ­ing work, and oth­ers are all day on Sat­ur­day, which eats the bet­ter part of my week­end. Since I’m work­ing on the house and bid­ing time to the impend­ing baby, I’m hav­ing less chance to work off the sym­pa­thy weight I put on over the win­ter. My legs are in good shape from bik­ing to work for two months now, but I’m doughy from the waist up. The only answer to this is mak­ing my life more dis­ci­plined; rationing my meals and set­ting aside time for other aer­o­bic exer­cise. I need to drop back to 180#, and the only way that’s going to hap­pen is if I eat right and run off the extra 10#.

$30 isn’t a suc­cess­ful yard sale. I was pretty crabby that day; but that was made up for by grilling stuffed pork chops on Mon­day, mak­ing home­made green tea ice cream, and find­ing out that home ren­o­va­tions can con­tinue next Mon­day. I just have to get rid of all the unsold yard sale crap, the free crib that we got [sans pro­pri­etary hard­ware for assem­bly] and try to get our hands on another one via Craigslist, fin­ish clean­ing the walls, prime them, paint them, move all our crap out from the mid­sec­tion of the house for the ren­o­va­tions and find out what the hell is tak­ing my sec­ond batch of floor­ing deliv­ery so long. Still much to do.

Also, I was cat-married the other night, apparently.

I sup­pose I should explain this. Deb­o­rah was cat-married to an actual cat in a pre­vi­ous life [aka Bal­ti­more]. She was unaware of this at the time, but after I explained it to her, she decided that she should cat-marry me as well. I guess she’s a cat bigamist.

So Deb­bie calls me yes­ter­day from the hos­pi­tal. A kid fell on her and the kid. Or, to be pre­cise, a kid pushed a kid right into her belly. I’d never rid­den my bike home so quickly, and rolled out to Huron hos­pi­tal to find out that every­thing was okay. So we sat starv­ing [not allowed to eat!] until they let us go. Had sushi to recu­per­ate, but this week has been mad­ness in the evenings, resched­uled appoint­ments, and hos­pi­tal unex­pect­ed­ness resulted in me tak­ing the day off of work today to try to keep the house together.

I got the veg­etable gar­den started. Or, more pre­cisely, I got the row of toma­toes planted. Straight­ened the house, put­tered in the yard, did the laun­dry. Almost ready for the garage sale tomor­row. So much to do.

To all those who have neg­a­tive things to say about the future of Cleve­land, I sub­mit the Lot­tery League.

I showed up to the Beach­land about 20 min­utes before the show started and stayed for the dura­tion. The ache in my feet and knees today is a tes­ta­ment to the fact that I’m not as young as I used to be. How­ever, the beer flowed like wine and I started out with a triple shot of Cuervo to get drunk as quickly as pos­si­ble. I knew I’d have to be sober 7 hours later when the show ended. The tequila needed some play­mates, so I had 3 Straub to bal­ance things out. Then, they ran out of Straub. Straub is, I think, the cheap beer of choice for Cleve­land rock­ers. Anyway.

Noth­ing cooler than last night is going to hap­pen in Cleve­land this year. Over 150 local musi­cians were ran­domly shuf­fled into 33 new bands; these bands had six weeks to make music for a 10 minute set at the Beach­land Ball­room. The result­ing music was an out­stand­ing inver­sion of Sturgeon’s Law. There was a bit of every­thing from, Japan­ese pop [Dr. Wid­get] to death metal [Born Raped [OK, no one else prob­a­bly thinks so, but I do.]] It was obvi­ous that some bands took their League sta­tus very seri­ously, while other were out to have a fun time. Yeah, a few of the bands sucked, but then there were bands like Free Moments and Post­cards From For­eign Shores who sent me shrap­neled in dif­fer­ent musi­cal direc­tions. The first few bands had shows with their offi­cial bands later in the evening [Hot Cha Cha was play­ing in Detroit, I believe] and the last few had the tough job of pump­ing up the music-wearied masses that came to The Big Show.

The ballsi­est band, in terms of their angle, was Sem­per Fi. A bit of per­for­mance art punk rock that involved Abu Ghraib ref­er­ences and Nazi salutes. I don’t think any­one knew what to make of it, but thank­fully there was The Big Show mas­cot ram­bling around var­i­ously as a bear, a par­rot, and a croc­o­dile [at one point the croc­o­dile suit was on back­wards so the tail became an engorged rep­til­ian phal­lus.] One of the bands had a dude in a panda suit. Secret Cleve­land Furrys?

There was also plenty of swag, well made T-shirts, pro­grams, tick­ets and the great­est col­lec­tion of local music for sale out­side of Music Saves. The sheer col­lab­o­ra­tive momen­tum behind the event is a tes­ta­ment to what Cleve­landers can do when they believe in some­thing. I talked about this with sev­eral peo­ple through­out the night, but most notably, Pat from Pat’s in the Flats. The Cleve­land music scene doesn’t com­pete, they coop­er­ate, and all are bet­ter for it. That’s why we get to have awe­some events like the Lot­tery League and Straight Outta Compound.

Of course, I took some video. Swayze All Over:

and Post­cards From For­eign Shores:

More on the Lot­tery League:

• Lou Muenz weblog posts
• Lou Muenz photos:
  • Lot­tery League Drawing
  • Lot­tery League Practices
• Cleve­land Scene Feature
• Plain Dealer Article
• Ron Kretsch’s Weblog [By Invi­ta­tion Only, WTF?]
• Lot­tery League MySpace [Fea­tures many links to Lot­tery League band pages]
  

Watched a hunt­ing pere­grine fal­con from my office win­dow and another rap­tor, much larger, stopped in for an inspec­tion. Didn’t look much like a bald eagle, but could have been a juve­nile; they don’t have the mark­ings yet. I don’t know of any other siz­able birds of prey in this area.

Lost my foun­tain pen. For real this time. About 8 years ago, a moth­erly Christ­mas gift. It had some seri­ous sen­ti­men­tal value. I could buy the same model & color from Sta­ples, but it wouldn’t be the same.

Great MetaFil­ter post on Wen­dell Berry. I’d read Fem­i­nism, the Body, and the Machine before, but he’s got a siz­able body of work and some seri­ous wis­dom on com­mu­nity, envi­ron­men­tal, edu­ca­tional and just about any other sort of atti­tude adjust­ment you might think the world needs. He’s a poet too.

I’m sched­uled to be inter­viewed by a Boston Uni­ver­sity jour­nal­ism grad­u­ate stu­dent this Sat­ur­day about Tremon­ter and my appar­ent sta­tus as a cit­i­zen jour­nal­ist. Tremon­ter woke up from its reg­u­lar win­ter nap this week. Nice to see.

I renewed my STOP SMILING sub­scrip­tion using the BOGO Super­fan offer they cur­rently have going. Sent my cousin Heather the other half. Heard from them today, they upgraded my cur­rent ‘script to super­fan sta­tus just because they rule.

I want my yard, though it became too cold again for much work out there. I think all of the grass in my front is kaput, rue and lamentation.

Quite the puz­zle; the last lit­tle bit. After get­ting my iMac back in Novem­ber, I had to refig­ure the best way of tak­ing vids from my con­sumer model still cam­era and get­ting them YouTube ready. Has­sle. Apples don’t like MPEGs, so I had to fig­ure the loop-de-loops to get MPEG to MOV to MPEG, so I could edit, et cetera. iMovie is vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble to use. I dicked around with MovieMaker on my old lap­top and it did the job. Now, I’ve got to save the MPEG from my cam­era, con­vert it to MOV using MPEG Stream­clip, edit in Final Cut Pro, and buy DivX for Mac just to get an opti­mized file for YouTube.

It says some­thing when FCP is eas­ier to use than iMovie. I had some vids from the Red Black and Green Christ­mas show at the Grog Shop, but the qual­ity was poor, as my cam­era sucks in low light. I put together this col­lec­tion of clips from when I was at the Pitts­burgh Zoo instead.

Deb­bie and I spent three days in Penn­syl­va­nia for a last gasp at cou­pled free­dom before the Kid arrives. I planned out our itin­er­ary well in advance and we had a great time; plenty of stuff to do and plenty of time to do noth­ing. We left Mon­day morn­ing and went to Pitts­burgh where our first stop was the Strip Dis­trict. The Strip is basi­cally Penn Avenue and is a bit like Cleveland’s West Side Mar­ket area, except longer in dis­tance and less cor­rupted by expen­sively uncom­fort­able town­homes. We ate at the Small­man Street Deli right after we arrived, basi­cally a shot in the dark choice, but an excel­lent one. They cure all of their deli meat in-house, buy their bread from a local bak­ery and make their sides fresh. Deb­bie got a roast beef sand­wich with moz­zarella and toma­toes as her side, and I went with pas­trami on rye and mac­a­roni salad [pic].

After lunch we strolled down Penn Avenue and win­dow shopped. I ended up buy­ing some tart pans from a kitchen sup­ply store, an item I’ve been unable to find in Cleve­land. We also went to this place called Fudgie Wudgie which has the smoothest fudge [pic] I’ve ever tasted. Then we drove around down­town Pitts­burgh, gawk­ing at how much live­lier and less run-down it appears than Cleve­land and went to the Pitts­burgh Zoo, which isn’t nearly as nice as the Cleve­land Zoo, although it does have a much nicer aquar­ium. Deb­bie bought the coolest a stuffed octo­pus in the world. While get­ting lost down­town I got a glance at the PPG Win­ter­gar­den, which I thought was a great idea and cer­tainly some­thing that Cleve­land could ben­e­fit from hav­ing. Through­out our Pitts­burgh stay I couldn’t help but com­pare Pitts­burgh and Cleve­land; after a few days of reflec­tion I think the main dif­fer­ence between the cities is that Pitts­burghers seem to have a greater sense of sol­i­dar­ity and pride in their city than Cleve­landers. I’m not sure what the rea­sons are for this, but I heard no one say any­thing bad about the city the entire time we were there, some­thing which it seems even peo­ple who claim to take pride in Cleve­land [like myself] can’t help but be down on the town quite often [some­thing I try not to do.]

We left Pitts­burgh and headed south­east, toward a lit­tle bed and break­fast called the Glades Pike Inn. We got one of their pack­age deals to go see the Frank Lloyd Wright con­struc­tions, Falling­wa­ter and Ken­tuck Knob. I’d been to both houses years pre­vi­ously on a trip with my mom. It was such a good time that I decided to go back. The Inn was built in 1842 as an inn, and was per­fectly suited to be a bed and break­fast. Our room had a fire­place, which was very very nice. The innkeeper, Janet L. Jones, was very hos­pitable and eager to direct us to other local restau­rants and places to visit. She’s def­i­nitely inter­ested in build­ing up the tourism for her neck of the woods and is a go-getter. She rec­om­mended that we have din­ner at the Pine Grill which was deli­cious. Deb­bie and I got the same thing, pesto-topped orange roughy with herbed rice and steamed veg­eta­bles [pic]. I also had a Penn Dark, which tasted a bit like alco­holic Coke, with­out the sweetness.

The next day we went to both Falling­wa­ter and Ken­tuck Knob. Deb­bie and I both agreed that Ken­tuck Knob was our favorite, which was my opin­ion so many years past when I went with my mom. Ken­tuck Knob is owned by Lord Palumbo who opened it for pub­lic tours in 1996, which was prob­a­bly right around the time I first vis­ited. The panorama at the top is the view from Ken­tuck Knob, and the farm pic­tured is where Lord Palumbo and his fam­ily stay when they are vis­it­ing. They only use Ken­tuck Knob for enter­tain­ing vis­i­tors. On the far hill­side are some huge wind tur­bines pro­duc­ing elec­tric­ity for the area. If some­place that rural can make it hap­pen, I sure hope Cleve­land can do the same. In tran­sit from Falling­wa­ter to Ken­tuck Knob, we stopped at Ohiopyle and ate lunch by the waterfall.

The sculp­ture gar­den at Ken­tuck Knob is some­thing that I think was added after my first trip there. Some of the sculp­tures were of the bor­ing various-bits-of-rusted-metal-welded-together-nonrepresentationally type, but there was a Claes Old­en­berg applecore and some man-made ponds that were beau­ti­ful under the pines. Pic­tured to the left is Ray Smith’s Red Army. They also have two pieces of the Berlin Wall, I think they only had one when I was there last. Some­how I liked it bet­ter when they only had one. After the tour, we had a nice walk down the hill­side and back to the car. All that we pur­chased from the gift shops were post cards and a reusable gro­cery bag, $4.67 total.

We got lost on the way back, but ended up in Som­er­set for din­ner, and another relax­ing night at the Glades Pike Inn. The next day I was start­ing to get sniffly, and I’m full blown con­gested [again!] now, but on our way back through Pitts­burgh we stopped at the Andy Warhol Museum. It only took about an hour to get through the whole museum, the only things I really liked in there were a cou­ple of Jasper Johns paint­ings, mostly we went because I thought Deb­bie would like it. Warhol has never done it for me. Since we had so much of the day unex­pect­edly avail­able to us, we went to the sales-tax-free Prime Out­lets in Grove City and blew a few hours clothes shop­ping. We got home around 7 on Wednes­day night, made din­ner, and zonked out. It was a good vacation.

You can view all of the vaca­tion pho­tos here.

As I passed the House of Blues today on the way to my bus stop I saw a high school emo boy throw­ing a tantrum at his girl­friend. She caught it and threw it right back, but was cer­tainly the more “mature” of the two. He was almost high-step stomp­ing his way toward me with a giant pouty­whine face half vis­i­ble under his dirty combed-over-one-eye hair­style and he tore some­thing out of his pocket and slammed it to the ground as he stomped along. His girl­friend was behind him yelling for him to come back. He took out his con­cert tick­ets and threw them to the ground as well before con­tin­u­ing his stomp around to East 4th toward Lola.

The girl­friend yelled “I’m tired of your shit!”, picked up one of the tick­ets and went into the HoB. I picked up the other ticket before it blew into a pud­dle and dropped it back at the ticket booth in case emo boy’s tantrum wore off and he decided he actu­ally wanted his $21 ticket to see “Hot Topic Presents The Sub City Take Action Tour fea­tur­ing Every Time I Die, From First To Last, The Bled, August Burns Red, The Human Abstract”

By the way, From First to Last has an album called Dear Diary, My Teen Angst Has a Body Count. I sup­pose, tech­ni­cally, that makes Tantrum-thrower emo­core, but I don’t really care.

I was at the County Coroner’s Office yes­ter­day for a meet­ing about redo­ing their web­site, cur­rently one of the old­est in the County. After the meet­ing we were given a tour of the facil­i­ties, which are impres­sive. I learned a lot about their pro­ce­dures, saw where the autop­sies are per­formed [on the top floor, with plenty of win­dows], saw the safe where all of the weapons that result in a death by acci­dent or sui­cide are kept, and even saw a bit of a train­ing autopsy. Those few sec­onds, being a few feet away from hol­lowed corpse were much dif­fer­ent than watch­ing the Stan Brakhage film on the sub­ject and my sub­se­quent poem about it. The actual event is much more fraught, I left with the feel­ing that work­ing at the Coroner’s office must demand a very spe­cific met­tle for all parts of the job. I don’t know if I could work with unknown corpses, know­ing that infec­tious dis­ease trans­mis­sion like Hepati­tis B is a very real pos­si­bil­ity. Even tran­scrib­ing the autopsy reports must be a rel­a­tively sur­real act.

Their foren­sic pho­tog­ra­phy and video depart­ments are very very capa­ble and man­age some extremely inter­est­ing tricks with their equipment.

At the other end of the spec­trum, today Deb­bie and I went to our one-shot lamaze class. Six hours long, it ate up our Sat­ur­day, but was quite infor­ma­tive. When we were doing one of the var­i­ous breath­ing tech­niques, I had to count on my fin­gers at Deb­bie, and acci­den­tally flipped her off. Of course, she cracked up and every­one thought she was the crazy one, not me.

Whew.

The rea­son I’ve been putting in so many late hours since the first of the year is now live to the world. The new Cuya­hoga County Board of Elec­tions site is now live. Our whole group has done pretty much noth­ing but recode the site from the ground up since Jan­u­ary 1st. I put together a site tour to show off all of the new bells and whis­tles, but I’ll touch on my favorites here.

My Vot­ing Information

The My Vot­ing Infor­ma­tion page is a great one-stop-shop for per­son­al­ized vot­ing infor­ma­tion, all of which is pub­lic record. If you enter your last name and date of birth you get detailed results con­cern­ing your polling loca­tion, bal­lot, dis­trict infor­ma­tion, past elec­tion par­tic­i­pa­tion [not your votes, just the elec­tions you’ve voted in], poll worker par­tic­i­pa­tion and com­mu­nity out­reach events in your city. There’s even a Google map which will give you direc­tions from your home to your polling location.

Elec­tion Results Wizard

The Elec­tion Results Wiz­ard lets you fol­low only the races you’re inter­ested in instead of hav­ing to scroll through the huge mas­ter results list.

Events Cal­en­dar

The Events Cal­en­dar lets you search for the events that you’re inter­ested in, and only the events you’re inter­ested in.

Val­i­da­tion, Accessibility

Work­ing within the design con­straints [not a big fan of hav­ing to use #EF3E42] and the con­straints of the ASP.NET CMS was great for the most part. I’m still hav­ing fits try­ing to get the server to stop spit­ting out so much trash code, but I’ve learned a lot about styling within .NET itself. Despite that, I’m at a loss of what to do with the remain­ing val­i­da­tion errors since even the three images miss­ing alt attrib­utes are inac­ces­si­ble because they aren’t hard-coded. I man­aged to give them title attrib­utes, but can’t fig­ure out the alt text trick. I’m try­ing to con­vince the devel­op­ers to take the Google Map API key out of the web.config and put it back into the script where it typ­i­cally is because ASP.NET doesn’t allow code blocks within the header. This means there are script ref­er­ences out­side of the header. And, ASP.NET labels spit out every­thing between tags which the val­ida­tor also chokes on because block-level ele­ments can’t be con­tained within inline ele­ments.Update: I’ve whit­tled down the val­i­da­tion errors to one, the onClick attribute that’s called as a user con­trol for the site search. That’s def­i­nitely one for a devel­oper to look at. The alt attrib­utes were inserted by using a text=”” attribute in the asp:hyperlink line. I’m used to a text attribute actu­ally spit­ting out text, so that wasn’t an intu­itive choice for me. The Google API isn’t called until some­one actu­ally clicks on a direc­tions link, so there are now no scripts out­side of the header, and all those span tags can be got­ten rid of by using ASP:Literal ele­ments instead of ASP:Label ones. That sim­ple switch cleaned up about 80% of the trash code that I was see­ing upon view­ing source. I’m learn­ing even more. Maybe I’ll even learn some pro­gram­ming here in a bit.

There might be a bet­ter way to go about this, but I’ve not had the chance to take an ASP.NET course yet, and it is new hat to the devel­op­ers as well. Those guys are frig­gin’ heroes though, no doubt.

In acces­si­bil­ity­land, unfor­tu­nately the site is heav­ily depen­dent on JavaScripts. There isn’t really any­thing I can do about that as a designer, and most of the inter­ac­tive items depend on it. I made sure to pro­vide access keys and tab index­ing where it would be help­ful and we’re now pro­vid­ing an acces­si­bil­ity state­ment, at least. There is always more to be done, but the hon­est truth is that acces­si­bil­ity becomes a low pri­or­ity when the lim­its of time, money and inter­est are more con­cerned with other things. On the bright side, the new site is worlds bet­ter than the old one for those who use alter­na­tive brows­ing methods.

The End

In the end I hope that [as cheesy as it sounds] my work on the BOE site will help improve the elec­toral process and expe­ri­ence for folks in Cuya­hoga County. Although I say so myself, the Cuya­hoga County Board of Elec­tions site is the best board of elec­tions site I’ve seen. I hope it influ­ences oth­ers to step up their game as much as the Web Group at the ISC has these past two months.

Time for a beer.

Life has been too busy to pay much atten­tion to this web­site. I’ve got a redesign about halfway done, but it will con­tinue to lan­guish until I don’t have to put in quite so many hours at work; so, after the March 4 Pri­mary. There have been a lot of errands to take care of lately, fram­ing art, work­ing on cur­tains, get­ting a rug for the bed­room, so the bed doesn’t ruin the wood floors, work­ing on the wall in the entry room, pay­ing down debt, doing laun­dry, doing dishes, along with var­i­ous other appointments.

I’ve had a bad sore throat/chest con­ges­tion for a week now. I finally bought some Mucinex, but although oth­ers swear by it, I notice no change in my abil­ity to hack up dense globs of phlegm. Sleep­ing is a nightmare.

On the baby front, we can feel him kick and punch and throw dance par­ties all of the time. Appar­ently he really likes peanut butter.

For din­ner tonight I’m mak­ing sweet potato gnoc­chi with sautéed arti­choke hearts and broc­coli with meat­balls on the side.

• $110 will get you approx­i­mately 250 items of sec­ond­hand baby clothes. No one needs to buy us any­thing resem­bling a baby cloth for at least the next 9 months.
• The Bobby web­site acces­si­bil­ity val­ida­tor is no longer avail­able online. It is now bun­dled into a piece of IBM soft­ware for pur­chase only. This makes it harder, not eas­ier, for web design­ers to build acces­si­ble websites.
• It is faster to ride RTA down­town than drive, since the E 9th and Euclid inter­sec­tion snarls every­thing up. It is actu­ally faster to exit on E 22nd Street and backtrack.
• No one is used to the bus lanes yet, they’re being used as right turn lanes, which fur­ther snarls traffic.
• After 3 years of pay­ing my con­sol­i­dated col­lege loans on time, I just received at 1% reduc­tion in the inter­est rate. Now it is at 2.375%, which is awe­some. I can pay it off faster now.

I received bear paw mit­tens for Christ­mas, and they’ve become my favorite gift. They give me near end­less amuse­ment, I get to act like a bear and make infi­nite puns about doing things with my bear hands. In addi­tion to this, I also get to act like a bear and make infi­nite puns about my bare hands. These mit­tens are so awe­some that peo­ple do triple takes. I pre­tend they are my actual hands and won­der aloud if I’ll ever find gloves that will fit. I prob­a­bly exas­per­ate every­thing within ear-sight of me when I have them on. They even have the bonus of being fairly warm, despite their acrylic nature. The next time I’m in Canada, I might try fish­ing with them.

It has also been sug­gested to me that I get a shirt that says “Every­one has the right to bear arms.”

The new year always kicks off some great new projects at the County, mostly because every­one has money to spend after bud­get approval. The focus last year was get­ting the new county home page off and run­ning, and in the year since we’ve made suf­fi­cient tech­no­log­i­cal progress that the home page now requires another rewrite. This time, if all goes accord­ing to plan and my knowl­edge of RSS and our Synapse Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem pays off, the home page will be able to update itself. This is prob­a­bly some time off though, as we have to put most of the cur­rent county sites into the CMS in the first place.

There are a few sites already out there run­ning the CMS, the most notable of these is the Depart­ment of Development’s site. While I’m still hav­ing fits over get­ting .NET to serve valid, standards-based code, the site itself has much bet­ter flow, and a sig­nif­i­cantly updated look and feel. Hope­fully it actu­ally feels like it has been designed, instead of just built.

The big ticket item for the first quar­ter of 2008 is a com­plete over­haul of the Board of Elec­tions site, putting it into the CMS, mak­ing it more like a por­tal and cre­at­ing pages with voter-specific infor­ma­tion and inter­ac­tive election-tracking as well. In addi­tion to the end-user bells and whis­tles, behind the scenes we should end up with less labor inten­sive updat­ing processes and sig­nif­i­cantly less server load.

Other sites cur­rently in the pipeline include the Office of Home­less Ser­vices, the Board of County Com­miss­sion­ers, Coro­ner, and Jus­tice Affairs. This is a good chance for me to build up some earned time so that I can take time off when the kid arrives.

Here at home, I’ve switched O/M over to Blue­host, an all-around good idea, as I can and am doing a redesign with mul­ti­ple Word­press instal­la­tions and databases.

The cre­ation of enclaves of like-minded peo­ple had a sec­ond effect: It made both lib­eral groups and con­ser­v­a­tive groups sig­nif­i­cantly more homo­ge­neous — and thus squelched diver­sity. Before peo­ple started to talk, many groups dis­played a fair amount of inter­nal dis­agree­ment on the three issues. The dis­agree­ments were greatly reduced as a result of a mere 15-minute dis­cus­sion. In their anony­mous state­ments, group mem­bers showed far more con­sen­sus after dis­cus­sion than before. The dis­cus­sion greatly widened the rift between lib­er­als and con­ser­v­a­tives on all three issues.

The Inter­net makes it exceed­ingly easy for peo­ple to repli­cate the Col­orado exper­i­ment online, whether or not that is what they are try­ing to do.

Cass R. Sun­stein — The Polar­iza­tion of Extremes

Bal­ti­more is a postin­dus­trial city, wedged between D.C. and Philadel­phia and strug­gling to find its future and rec­on­cile its past. In that sense it’s like St. Louis and Cleve­land and Philly and a lot of other rust-belt Amer­i­can places, and so sto­ries from here have a chance of being about more than Bal­ti­more per se. The sto­ry­telling here might be quite detailed in ref­er­enc­ing local geog­ra­phy and cul­ture, but it trans­lates eas­ily to else­where and there­fore acquires addi­tional rel­e­vance easily.

David Simon — Creator/Writer/Producer of The Wire as inter­viewed by Nick Hornby.

I’m preg­nant. That’s right, you heard me. To be per­fectly spe­cific, my girl­friend Deb­bie is preg­nant. I’m going to be a father! We’re going to be par­ents! This wasn’t expected or planned, but we both want chil­dren so we’re mak­ing the best of it. This news explains the inter­mit­tent noise amid all of the radio silence here lately. We’ve been mov­ing in together, break­ing the news to our fam­ily, and doing some seri­ous psy­cho­log­i­cal adap­ta­tion to our new roles. She’s 15 weeks along at this point, so we’ve had time to get over the ini­tial shock and get excited about the actual birth. The due date is June 20th.

I’m not too good at keep­ing a secret and I would have felt like I was lying to post con­tin­u­ously with such impor­tant news kept in the bag along with the cat. We heard the heart­beat the last time we vis­ited the doc­tor, and a sono­gram will show up in a few more weeks. Deb­bie had pretty awful dawn-to-dawn morn­ing sick­ness for the last three months, but now that it is fad­ing away a bit every­body is less stressed.

We spent Thanks­giv­ing with Debbie’s par­ents and Christ­mas with my fam­ily. Christ­mas week was a flurry of dri­ving and it was good to get back into town, espe­cially since, while we were gone, I had wood floors installed in part of the house. I still have to put down quarter-round and grates for the ven­ti­la­tion, not to men­tion work on the walls in the main entry room, but at least two of the room feel like home now.

New Year’s was cel­e­brated with a cou­ple of friends and a tense game of Star Wars Monop­oly. You’re pretty much caught up. I’ll now take a few questions.

Nearly a month ago I received my new iMac. I got the 20″ with a 750GB HD, 2.14GHz Core Duo and 1 GB of RAM. I ordered it after Octo­ber 26th, so it shipped with Leop­ard. My inten­tion in get­ting an Intel-based Mac was so that I could avoid all of the cruft that now accom­pa­nies PC pur­chases and still run Win­dows XP and there­fore all my old com­puter games; Star­craft, ho! No need to run an emu­la­tion, to worry about the inevitable bog­ging down of Win­dows installs, and native on-the-fly installs using Boot Camp. Easy. Well, not really.

There is a com­mon error when using Boot­Camp where the Win­dows install doesn’t rec­og­nize any of the par­ti­tions cre­ated, so I quit the install which cor­rupts the par­ti­tion map and gives the iMac a white screen on restart. I took it in to the Apple store for the first time and found out that it was bork­ing at the boot selec­tor, which is a seri­ous problem.

After get­ting the drive wiped, I tried again; this time accept­ing the incor­rect par­ti­tion and try­ing to install Win­dows. This time it worked well enough, installing Win­dows at least, but XP thought the drive only had 130GB on it, and it destroyed the Leop­ard install. Since I couldn’t boot from the Tiger disk and run Disk Util­ity from it, I had to go back to the Apple store, where the same guy wiped my drive again. This time when I got home and rein­stalled Tiger and Leop­ard, I wiped and repar­ti­tioned my exter­nal drive and installed Leop­ard on it. This way if I borked things again I’d be able to wipe the HD on my own. Good thing I did this, because I wiped the drive 4 more times before I got every­thing working.

My XP volume-licensed disk was Ser­vice Pack 1, so I had to get my hands on an XP SP 2 vol­ume license disk before I got Boot­Camp to behave itself. This took a bit of time in itself, as the disk I was using kept throw­ing a Man­i­fest Parse Error at me. Even­tu­ally I got both XP Pro and Leop­ard installed on the same machine and could start installing soft­ware. Just about every­thing worked, but Leop­ard has some sim­i­lar prob­lems as Vista when installing older software.

Apple sent me Tiger install disks and the Leop­ard upgrade disk. Installing Leop­ard offers the option to com­pletely erase Tiger and install Leop­ard cleanly. The prob­lem with doing this is that iLife is only on the Tiger disk and won’t be installed if you do an Erase and Install using the Leop­ard upgrade. The Air­port Express Base Sta­tion soft­ware disk can’t run on Leop­ard either, and Leop­ard doesn’t sup­port any Java run­time envi­ron­ments or devel­op­ment soft­ware, which has the Java devel­oper com­mu­nity up in arms.

On the plus side, my Mighty Mouse sup­ports right click­ing in XP, and other nice dri­ver access is avail­able for disk eject and vol­ume con­trol from within Win­dows, and all of my periph­er­als installed cleanly and seam­lessly on the OS X side.

I bought an extremely dis­counted paired kit of Mushkin 2GB RAM and installed them on my own. Took about five min­utes, worked like a charm, and saved me $700 if I had pur­chased it through the Apple Store.

I also picked up Halo 2 for Vista using my Best Buy Reward Zone cer­tifi­cates and using a sim­ple hack found online, got it up and run­ning on XP. This basi­cally proved that Microsoft mar­keted and released it as Vista-only in order to encour­age more peo­ple to upgrade to Vista. It runs on Direct X 9 just fine, even though my iMac comes with Direct X 10. The only goofy part is that Halo 2 doesn’t like my third-party com­puter con­troller, which meant I had to buy a Microsoft xBox 360 con­troller in order to play the game, which I pur­chased with the gift card that I got from Neigh­bor­hood Con­nec­tions. Of course, the pro­pri­etary Microsoft con­troller [after scroung­ing around for the cor­rect dri­ver to install, since the web­site listed in the xBox con­troller man­ual was non-existent] worked like a charm. You also can’t play Halo 2 mul­ti­player online via a stan­dard server setup like every other mul­ti­player on the mar­ket. You have to sub­scribe to Live. Screw you and your pro­pri­etary strong-arming, Microsoft.

Now the only prob­lem I have is that file-sharing between the oper­at­ing sys­tems is lim­ited because you can only do it natively if Win­dows is installed on a FAT32 which lim­its the size of the par­ti­tion to 32GB, and my Win­dows par­ti­tion is already full! If I can find a third-party piece of soft­ware that will enable me to share files between OS X and an NTFS par­ti­tion, I’ll wipe and rein­stall Win­dows with all my games, with Visual Stu­dio 2005 and be good to go, com­pletely, finally.

I used to watch The Price is Right all the time with my grand­par­ents. It came on and still comes on at 11am, right when they’d eat lunch. Plinko was my favorite game, of course; my least favorite: Blank Check. Today in the Can­teen at work The Price is Right was on with Drew Carey and slightly mod­i­fied pro­duc­tion val­ues. Barker’s Beau­ties are long gone, replaced by even more plasticky-looking vapidi­ties; same old crappy mer­chan­dise though.

The main epiphany that I had is the genius of the show itself. It gets peo­ple to watch a full hour of com­mer­cials in the guise of a game show. The Price is Right is the epit­ome of Amer­i­can cap­i­tal­ism and con­sumerism. That it took a major change of cast to finally clue me into this fact is indica­tive of just how entrenched in that sys­tem I am. Yikes.

It might be a bit unfair to make the state­ment apply solely to Amer­ica, as The Price is Right is inter­na­tion­ally pan­demic. Amer­ica has always been good at export­ing cul­ture and entertainment.

I finally had the chance to try out the Euclid Cor­ri­dor today, rid­ing the #6 to a Flash Action­Script class at the Cole Cen­ter for Con­tin­u­ing Edu­ca­tion. When I started at the ISC just over a year ago the direc­tor empha­sized his encour­age­ment for us to take skill-building classes. If there was an award for most classes taken, I’d prob­a­bly win it. I haven’t quite fig­ured out how the whole Euclid Cor­ri­dor thing works, but the bus dri­vers know it, and step­ping off a bus right onto the bus plat­form was much nicer than step­ping off a bus into a big pud­dle of snowmelt, and I only had to walk half a block to get to the Center.

First snow­falls and morn­ings are hand-in-glove. It was very quiet and dark wait­ing for the bus, then chat­ter­ing brightness.

Now all the days and nights of jour­ney­ing through the for­est drew together and were behind Falk. He was not camp­ing: he had come to a place. He need not think at all about the weather, the dark, the stars and beasts and trees. He could sit stretch­ing out his legs to a bright hearth, could eat in com­pany with another, could bathe in front of the fire in a wooden tub of hot water. He did not know which was the great­est plea­sure, the warmth of that water wash­ing dirt and weari­ness away or the warmth that washed his spirit here, the absurd elu­sive vivid talk of the old man, the mirac­u­lous com­plex­ity of human con­ver­sa­tion after the long silence of the wilderness.

Ursula K. Le Guin — City of Illusions

Time for class.

The way home wasn’t nearly as fun. The #6 doesn’t run west­ward on Euclid just yet, and the 9X, with its sta­tus as an Express, doesn’t stop and runs rel­a­tively rarely on Chester, so I had to walk 30 blocks to Pub­lic Square, where I was just in time to catch the 23. On the plus side, dur­ing the walk I saw a roller-blading Santa Claus wield­ing a ski pole.

Birth­days get pro­gres­sively more bor­ing as one ages. Other than the ini­tial “Yay It’s my birth­day!” upon wak­ing up today isn’t going to be much dif­fer­ent than usual. Although I might stop by Dave’s and pick up a sugar-cream pie on my way home. Oh man, I love me some sugar-cream pie. One year ago, I put in my notice at my old job. That was a great birth­day present. When­ever I get frus­trated here at the County, I just remem­ber how life-sucking the work at Thomson-West was and thank my lucky stars.

A lot has changed in a year. I’ve grown into my job, there is a new con­fi­dence in me when I hop around town talk­ing to dif­fer­ent County depart­ments about improv­ing their web pres­ence. I actu­ally have an exper­tise that can improve the way they inter­act with the pub­lic on the web, and the chance to use it. In the last year, I broke up with an old girl­friend, bought a house, found a new great woman, rode my bike to work for seven months, and took pub­lic trans­porta­tion for the other five. I also broke a big toe and an elbow and finally got to play Punk Rock Soft­ball. I’m also seri­ously cash-strapped as the house absorbs all of my money. So if any­one wants to treat me to my new favorite meal [a cheese­burger, sweet potato fries and a Guin­ness at Pros­per­ity] tonight, I’m cer­tainly down for that. Tues­day is the day for the cheese­burger deal at happy hour, if I’m not mistaken.

I didn’t make ribs this year, which was unfor­tu­nate. I am going to have two Thanks­giv­ings though, so that will make up for it.

I must be hungry.

I had my sec­ond phys­i­cal ther­apy appoint­ment today. The ther­a­pist put heat on my bicep for ten min­utes and then gave it a mas­sage for a bit more. She thought that it might be tight­ened and pre­vent­ing my arm from full exten­sion. She was right, a bit. I’ve made good progress with the exer­cises already, only 10° [the hard­est ones to get back] from nor­mal on exten­sion, and about 20° from bend­ing it in half. Pretty good con­sid­er­ing that I have four more ses­sions to get the rest back on track.

I received an Air­port Express Base Sta­tion today and just got it con­fig­ured. It was nearly a life-changing expe­ri­ence. My speaker-out jack has been busted for 9 months or so, so lis­ten­ing to music on my com­puter while doing other work was nearly impos­si­ble. But thanks to Air­Tunes and the handy 3.5mm stereo-mini jack on the base sta­tion, I’m blast­ing some Alice & Chains while cook­ing generic tuna helper. I can finally get caught up on all the music that’s been stag­nat­ing on my hard drive lately. What’s even bet­ter is that I’m typ­ing this in the kitchen and the music is com­ing out of my speak­ers in the liv­ing room. Wire­less music, holy shit. I can con­trol the vol­ume, play­back, etc. any­where within range of the base sta­tion, and be con­nected to the inter­net while I do it. Tech­nol­ogy rules. The base sta­tion even has a USB jack, so once I get a split­ter, I’ll be able to access my exter­nal hard drive and printer wire­lessly as well. It might seem a petty thing to be so excited about, but it really does free me to do a lot of work.

Or watch stuff on Vide­oLe­mon, whatever.

I had a phys­i­cal ther­apy appoint­ment today at Metro­Health. I must say, I’m impressed with their hos­pi­tal. They’ve got excel­lent, good-natured staff, and they follow-up on small prob­lems like a dachs­hund down a bad­ger hole.

I’m sans 70# of grip strength in my right arm because of the bro­ken elbow, and my range of motion degrees for straight­en­ing the arm are poor as well. I also real­ized just how under­served and orphaned I was at Notre Dame when I dis­lo­cated my kneecap. The extent of my phys­i­cal ther­apy there was being told to ride a bicy­cle until I felt bet­ter. No one mea­sured my range of motion or mon­i­tored my progress; and I won­der if I would have an arthritic knee now if I’d some pro­fes­sional assis­tance at the time.

I’ve got five more appoint­ments for phys­i­cal ther­apy, some exer­cises to do at home, good lit­er­a­ture and a deter­mi­na­tion to get my dom­i­nant arm to 100% again. Thank­fully, I have some good help this time.

My street just made the cut to be one of the pilot areas for a retry at Cleve­land Curb­side Recy­cling. I’m quite pumped about this because I recy­cle most of my waste, and pil­ing it into my car and dri­ving to the near­est dropoff point seemed a bit cock­eyed. My cans showed up today. In addi­tion to the curb­side recy­cling, there is also a City of Cleve­land Approved Reg­u­lar Trash Can, a 96-gallon behe­moth that I will pretty much never fill. I aver­age about 1 kitchen-sized bag of actual trash every two weeks. Since my house is a 2-unit, I got 4 cans. In addi­tion to the two cans I’d pur­chased on my own, this brings my trash­can total to 6. Four of them are in my tum­ble­down shed.

The recy­cling can is already full.

The doc­tor told me that I don’t need a sling any­more, [the elbow is still broke-joke, but a sling would hin­der more than help heal­ing] and gave me a bet­ter boot to wear while my toe heals. What I haven’t fig­ured out is how the hydrocodone and prescription-strength ibupro­fen is affect­ing me. I try to go at least 8 conscious-hours per day with­out tak­ing any meds so my body doesn’t get too used to them, and they don’t hurt my liver too much, but I get these pound­ing headaches not long after dis­con­tin­u­a­tion. I don’t know if this is because of how close my upper wis­dom teeth were to my sinuses, or whether my head hurts because my body is detox­ing from the meds. It could also be because I’ve not been eat­ing too much lately, dou­bly hard to do so when it hurts to chew and I have to eat with the wrong arm.

This is why I don’t like other peo­ple around when I’m sick. I’m grouchy about pid­dling stuff.

This is the first Hal­loween in some­thing like a decade in which I’ve not watched The Crow on Devil’s Night and The Rocky Hor­ror Pic­ture Show on All Hal­lows Eve itself. What with my double-gimpédness and var­i­ous other respon­si­bil­i­ties, I had to forgo the pleasure.

I did, how­ever, get to hand out candy for the first time in about a decade as well. I esti­mated fairly well, based on the num­ber of gob­lins that my neigh­bor had last year. I have per­haps 20 Kit Kats left. It was fun to sit out on the porch and encour­age the lit­tlest ones to say “Trick or Treat” and give the older kids with­out cos­tumes shit for not hav­ing cos­tumes. I made paper cranes for the adults, and it was good to pass the time fold­ing in between groups of gob­lins. The moth­ers were all tick­led to get them.

The Pump­kin Tide

I saw thou­sands of pump­kins last night
come float­ing in on the tide,
bump­ing up against the rocks and
rolling up on the beaches;
it must be Hal­loween in the sea.

–Richard Brauti­gan, 1968

I carved on Sun­day with some friends. Last minute plan­ning resulted in a lack of pump­kin, but carv­ing water­mel­ons was just as fun, and ulti­mately more effec­tive on dis­play, when carved and lit appro­pri­ately. Still my favorite hol­i­day, even as the fla­vor changes with age.

Even with my wis­dom teeth extracted, in addi­tion to all of the other cur­rent injuries, it all still hurts less than one dis­lo­cated kneecap. How­ever, it is hard to do most any­thing with­out the use of my dom­i­nant arm. It is pretty much like I only have one arm, period. It is hard to wash my hands, put on deodor­ant, wash dishes, tie shoelaces, but­ton or zip up a coat, type, and wipe.

Eat­ing is actu­ally easy, or was until I got chip­munked in my mouth. I’m deft with left-handed uten­silry. I ended up get­ting my hydrocodone Rx filled, because the tooth throb­bing was so ridicu­lous. [Appar­ently no spe­cial char­ac­ter exists for the pre­scrip­tion sym­bol]. I only have a $5 copay for generic pre­scrip­tions which is sweet. I did have to drop 20% of the cost of my extrac­tion though. Buy­ing a Mac is going to have to be put off for a cou­ple of months.

It is start­ing to get cold enough that I am antic­i­pat­ing the end of bike-ride-to-work sea­son. I was sur­prised this morn­ing to feel a pang of regret over this. The early morn­ing exer­cise, con­cen­tra­tion and sur­prises [like the ground­hog across from the VTR] helped me be a bet­ter worker.

That was writ­ten yes­ter­day. There is a unique savor to self-inflicted irony. I went ass-over-teakettle last night on my way to a meet­ing about crime in Tremont. I was mugged by the side­walk but it only took my dig­nity. The dam­age report is a scraped left palm, abraded left cheek, busted chin, bro­ken left toe and bro­ken right elbow. That’s what I get for rid­ing down the side­walk too fast, and using my front brake too much. If I get my wis­dom teeth out tomor­row I’ll look like I belong to a fight club.

I’ve always wanted to learn how to do more shit south­paw anyway.

You can make six paper cranes out of one letter-sized sheet of paper. The two small­est ones would make per­fect earrings.

The conun­drum is that the lan­guage to describe the inef­fa­ble splen­dors and pos­si­bil­i­ties of our lives takes time to mas­ter, takes a cer­tain unhur­ried engage­ment with the tasks of descrip­tion, assess­ment, cri­tique, and con­ver­sa­tion; that to speak this slow lan­guage you must slow down, and to slow down you must have some inkling of what you will gain by doing so. It’s not an elite lan­guage; nomadic and remote tribal peo­ples are now quite good at pick­ing and choos­ing from development’s cas­cade of new toys, and so are some of the cash-poor, culture-rich peo­ple in places like Louisiana. Poetry is good train­ing in speak­ing it, and skep­ti­cism is help­ful in reject­ing the four horse­men of this apoc­a­lypse, but they both require a mind that likes to roam around and the time in which to do it.

Ulti­mately, I believe that slow­ness is an act of resis­tance, not because slow­ness is a good in itself but because of all that it makes room for, the things that don’t get mea­sured and can’t be bought.

- Rebecca Sol­nit

I think I really only have one pet peeve; peo­ple who com­plain about a part of their life but do noth­ing to fix that prob­lem or improve upon it. Dri­ves me batty.

On my wet, windy walk to work this morn­ing, a bro­ken umbrella flapped on the side­walk like a dying bird.

Lamb says some­where that if, of three friends (A, B, and C), A should die, then B loses not only A but “A’s part in C,” while C loses not only A but “A’s part in B.” In each of my friends there is some­thing that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activ­ity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets. Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald’s reac­tion to a specif­i­cally Car­o­line joke. Far from hav­ing more of Ronald, hav­ing him “to myself” now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald. Hence true Friend­ship is the least jeal­ous of loves.

- C.S. Lewis The Four Loves

I’ve finally started paint­ing, I have to have three rooms com­pletely painted by Novem­ber because I’m get­ting floor­ing put in then. My life has been topsy-turvy of late, very busy and alter­nat­ing between ridicu­lously stress­ful and ridicu­lously chill. I think it is going to take another few weeks before I know for sure where I’m head­ing for good.

I got a park­ing ticket in Cleve­land Heights the other night. The vio­la­tion was for park­ing in a no park­ing zone between 3am and 6am. The sign right above my car says, quite bla­tantly, no park­ing between 3:30pm and 6:30pm. I called up Cleve­land Heights and they said that there is prob­a­bly a sign at the begin­ning of the street or upon enter­ing the city that states the no park­ing ordi­nance. I’m pretty sure that’s a load of bull­shit, but I’m going to go check out May­field Road to make sure. Then I’ll con­test it. It is only a $10 ticket, but Cleve­land Heights has the sort of rep­u­ta­tion for this kind of abuse of power, that it is cer­tainly prob­a­ble that they would “acci­den­tally” make out a ticket and fig­ure the unlucky per­son will just suck it up and upchuck the 10-spot. Good thing I’m stub­born. If they’re going to waste my time, I’m happy to waste theirs. Besides, what kind of sense does it make to dis­al­low park­ing between 3am and 6am, it only makes sense if you think the prime time to ticket peo­ple is when they’re the like­li­est to be asleep.

The only down­side to hav­ing a sec­ond gen­er­a­tion iPod Shuf­fle is that the damn thing is so tiny you can lose it fairly eas­ily. I can’t find mine. I remem­ber get­ting into my car last night and tak­ing it out of the ash­tray, but I don’t remem­ber where I put it. I searched for awhile but no dice thus­far. The Stu­pid™ attacked when, for a brief moment, I thought about ask­ing Google “Where is my iPod?”

I’ve offi­cially been online too long.

Found! Appar­ently I stored the iPod in what was obvi­ously the most appro­pri­ate place at the time, the toe of my left run­ning shoe. Thanks Google!

Tequila and I got reac­quainted last night. Our rela­tion­ship has matured and doesn’t hurt me as much as it used to. I surely needed some of that after get­ting called into work yes­ter­day for six hours of frus­trat­ing, ill-planned, dead­lined updates. I was gung-ho to get some sig­nif­i­cant work accom­plished at home. The Blue Col­lar Bar Crawl was a good way to rub off that stress, and I think I might relax for a few hours today any­way instead of doing house work. I’ve just got too many things to do and not enough time to do them, unless I give up all my down time which results in the grouchy Adam that is writ­ing this post.

Decided to head into work a bit later than usual today and biked into Jeff Schuler at the down­town end of Carnegie bridge. He invited me to the brief Bike to Work Day meetup at A.J. Rocco’s and I tagged along and met a few folks. Ended up with a Cleve­land Bikes t-shirt and a con­tact for some free­lance web work. Learned about fixed gear bikes and some­thing call the track stand. I also found out that A.J. Rocco’s has break­fast sand­wich­ery, some­thing I’ve been desir­ing of late. Fortuitous.

At lunch I tipped the hot dog lady $1.40 and I think it made her day. She was grumbly and non-eye-contacting until I tipped her, then she looked at me and smiled and thanked me loudly. I am lik­ing this fall weather. Need to be 15 degrees cooler so I can bust out the scarves though.

I see plenty of those huge ban­ners down­town and bill­boards in the imme­di­ate Cleve­land vicin­ity pro­mot­ing Cleve­land Plus, but I’ve yet to see one any­where out­side of Cleve­land proper. I was under the impres­sion that this mar­ket­ing cam­paign is for folks out­side of the region, try­ing to attract them [and busi­ness] here. Has any­one actu­ally seen a Cleve­land Plus bill­board, TV spot, or other mar­ket­ing effort out­side of Cleveland?

I put an ad up on Craigslist for some left­over fur­ni­ture and I’ve been get­ting the most gram­mat­i­cally inept and non­sen­si­cal emails I’ve ever seen in response. I know in the abstract that a vast amount of peo­ple using the inter­tubes give off the slack-jawed idiot impres­sion in their usage of all caps, no punc­tu­a­tion, mixed tenses, abbre­vi­a­tions and such, but being inun­dated with 4 dozen or so sim­i­lar yet dif­fer­ent mes­sages is a con­stant reminder that half the pop­u­la­tion is, by neces­sity, below aver­age intel­li­gence. My two favorites, quot­ing the entirety of each email verbatim:

HI I NEED THE TABLE . IS OT VERY HAVE

where are you

Those aren’t even C+ quality.

I’m retir­ing this week. I got a wire through my back bike tire on the way home from work last night; I was com­ing around the cor­ner of Abbey and Colum­bus at a good clip and the back tire felt fat and fish­taily mak­ing the turn, so I got off, checked, and ended up walk­ing the last mile or so home. Took the bike in to Fridrich’s for a tune-up, recal­i­bra­tion and retir­ing. Then I zipped on over to NTB in Lake­wood [since West­own Tire wouldn’t pick up the phone] and got four new tires put on my beater. Basi­cally my car was totaled, since the cost of the tires was more than the car is worth. How­ever, that val­u­a­tion is based purely on fun­gi­bil­ity. The fact that my beater is spa­cious and the engine runs like a dream is worth far more to me than the actual com­par­a­tive value of the beast.

While wait­ing to retire, I ate at Dianna’s. I could’ve walked around the cor­ner to My Friends, but I was feel­ing lazy. I’d for­got­ten how pur­ga­to­r­ial eat­ing at Dianna’s can be, espe­cially alone. It is cer­tainly the low­est rung diner in that area. To class myself up after­ward, I got a Frosty from Wendy’s across the street.

I’m tak­ing an Illus­tra­tor class at CSU’s CCE. I’ve picked up a cou­ple of good tips, but what I’m start­ing to dis­cover is that all of these con­tin­u­ing edu­ca­tion courses move far too slowly for me. These classes only move at the pace of the slow­est stu­dent, which is typ­i­cally some­one who has never used a graphic design pro­gram before. Granted, these are begin­ner classes, but when you’re mov­ing at the pace of the accountant-student, it gets tough to stay interested.

Plus, there is a required book for this course that the CSU book­store didn’t have in stock. The instruc­tor said that we wouldn’t be able to take the course with­out the book, so some other lady, after telling us it was our fault for not hav­ing the book, made some calls and appar­ently got some shipped to us overnight by UPS. There are only a few hours left of this class and I still don’t have a book. When it comes in, I’m cer­tainly not going to pur­chase it. Okay, I bought it. The County will reim­burse me, and then any­one else there who wants to learn Illus­tra­tor can just bor­row the book instead of tak­ing the class.

I do enjoy learn­ing the the things that are new to me, but I keep hop­ing these classes will give pro­fes­sional work­flow and pro­duc­tiv­ity tips in addi­tion to the intri­ca­cies of the pen tool and the dif­fer­ence between raster and vec­tor. It is also pretty lame when the course just fol­lows along the book. If I wanted that I’d’ve just bought the book in the first place.

• How DNS works.
• How to set up a Mac share that is acces­si­ble by PCs.
• How good chal­lah bread is. Espe­cially with Boar’s Head tav­ern ham, a slice of edam and some brown sugar and pecan mus­tard. [I’m also aware of just how reli­giously inap­pro­pri­ate that sand­wich is.]
• That sex can some­times feel so good to a woman that they are con­vinced that they are going to end up preg­nant after­ward; even if that is not possible.
• That olive oil cake is ridi­cu­li­cious. [Now I must learn how to make it.]
• The basics of how artists appre­ci­ate art. [DAIJ.]
• To use the tag.
• That pick­ing a paint color for the wall of the mas­ter bed­room will likely deter­mine the basic color scheme for the entire house. [White it is?]
• That peo­ple will bicker over the same things inces­santly even when pos­si­ble courses of action appear; because they are lazy.
• About ser­ifs.
• Seats at the Cin­e­math­eque are too close together for my knees. [I already knew this, but keep forgetting.]
• How to pitch my team’s capa­bil­i­ties so that clients trust us with most of the design and devel­op­ment process.
• The wind on Carnegie Bridge can get so strong that it becomes nearly impos­si­ble to pedal a bicycle.

It has been a busy few days. Thurs­day was the Night to Unite which I have a bunch of pho­tos of since I let Amy use my cam­era. Fri­day I ended up work­ing a bit later than usual since some impor­tant web main­te­nance came in right at the end of the work day and I was the only one left around to post it. I sup­pose I shouldn’t com­plain too much though, since I got to watch the Thun­der­birds prac­tice for the air­show most of the day out of my office win­dow. Once I got home my friend Sandy needed some help replac­ing her ancient 200#+ stove with a much newer and hip­per model. Since I just went through that myself, I helped with the gas and sun­dries. Then I had to rush to get clean and hit the gro­cery store for the fix­ings for din­ner. I had a friend over and grilled some mari­naded rib­eye steaks with baked sweet pota­toes and snow peas. It was delicious.

Sat­ur­day was an early start in order to get to the Geor­gia Tech ver­sus Notre Dame dis­as­ter­ba­cle. I met up with Liam and once-again preg­nant Anne [this time Liam won and it is a boy] for a brief moment before going in search of Jeremy. [jmay, I was gonna sur­prise call you when I got in town, but don’t have your dig­its any­more. I sucked at that. Sorry to miss you man.] After the game there was an inter­minable hour spent wait­ing to get out of the park­ing lot, because every­one kept let­ting peo­ple in front of them. I vented my road rage for a bit and then real­ized it would be much bet­ter to appre­ci­ate the good com­pany I was in. Stopped at Fazoli’s on the way home and got back into Cleve­land with­out even being drowsy thanks to great conversation.

Sun­day was pretty much a wash, late break­fast and a cou­ple of recu­per­naps. Watched a pretty ter­ri­ble movie called Sun­shine [it is just as for­get­table and pretty much exactly like some movie that I once saw about going to the cen­ter of the earth and set­ting off a bomb.] while doing infi­nite laun­dry and cleaned house.

Today I fin­ished scrap­ing the walls and sand­ing in the mas­ter bed­room. I also mowed the yard and trimmed and swept and made a list and checked it twice. Tonight or tomor­row I have to watch The Wages of Fear and use the rec­om­mended Zinsser primer on the walls prior to pick­ing out some paint. Prob­a­bly tomor­row, since I’ve been invited to hang out with Sandy and Amy tonight for some grilling.

In other gym-related news, there is this dude who I’ve seen at the gym since I started going there that never lifts weights. He dicks around the entire time, almost always look­ing at him­self in the mir­ror and going through the motions of lift­ing weights, set­ting up the bar, adjust­ing seat heights, switch­ing out han­dles and weights, clean­ing the bench, sit­ting down and get­ting “in the zone”, but never actu­ally doing a set or even a rep. He spends some­thing like an hour in the locker room, groom­ing and comb­ing his hair and shit too. I once showed up and he was in the locker room comb­ing his hair, did my approx­i­mately one-hour work­out, and when I went to the locker room he was still comb­ing his hair. Weird thing is, the guy is frig­ging ripped, so he must actu­ally lift sometime.

Saloio bread is gross. I picked up a loaf from Dave’s because it seemed to be the clos­est bak­ery approx­i­ma­tion to whole wheat, since they were out of the lat­ter. It is salty as hell, crumbly, dense, and chewy. It tastes worse than the home­made hosts that Fr. Stan makes back at St. Gabriel’s in Con­nersville. Never again.

I get so much weird junk mail about mort­gages now that I’m a home­owner. A lot of it is obvi­ous scam stuff about PMI and refi­nanc­ing, but some of it is not so obvi­ous scam stuff that looks like offi­cial doc­u­men­ta­tion from Fifth Third. Today how­ever, I received a scratch off ticket. It says on the ticket that all tick­ets are win­ners for stuff like an xBox or iPod Video, the only oblig­a­tion is to sit through a demon­stra­tion of some home care prod­ucts. Fat chance.

I also both like and have a crush on some­one.

Lou shot me an email today to help him restore his Word­Press after his site was hacked, he came over right after I got home and we fixed it fairly quickly. Then he and I met up with Shawn at the Lin­coln Park Pub for Taco Tues­day and I ran into my old boss. Found out she reads this and has been keep­ing tabs. Hi boss. Had some tacos, met some new folks, shot the shit and had a nice relax­ing time for a cou­ple of hours. That’s the kind of soci­ety I dig. Spon­ta­neous, chill, hilar­i­ous, food.

Mar­ried women have been hit­ting on me the last few days. I was at my friend Sandy’s birth­day party on Sat­ur­day and Amy and I both got the vibe that this run­way cat­a­log mod­el­ish woman was flirt­ing with me. Then, at the gym today, this other lady kept mov­ing to work out in front of me and check­ing to see if I was look­ing at her and asked me if I was get­ting a good work­out. Wed­ding ring on the fin­ger. Maybe they aren’t hit­ting on me [pos­tu­late] and I’ve an enor­mous ego [fact] or they feel like I’m safe to flirt at [pos­tu­late] when the hubs isn’t around. This is just as strange as get­ting hit on by gay guys while run­ning was a year ago; but not as funny. My cur­rent boss says that being mar­ried doesn’t mean what it used to, and that expec­ta­tion that mar­ried folks are going to cheat trou­bles me.

My tol­er­ance has been wear­ing thin lately for unrea­son­able bull­shat­tery. I’ve got a pepper-pot of rants a-simmer on a fair range of top­i­cal­ity and have for some time. My typ­i­cal behav­ior is to only be as salty as nec­es­sary when nec­es­sary, but I’ve had some visions of using my still cam­era and mak­ing some video rants to post on YouTube, with the delib­er­ate attempt to offend every­body while also being tongue-in-cheek rever­sive humor pum­mel­ing myself. While this seems like a new to me idea, I have the dis­tinct feel­ing that is is already played. I would need to care­fully craft the rantwrits to not trip with bull­shit and resound not founder. This, I see, as the only pos­i­tive improve­ment that such activ­ity would have on my life, whereas apart from gen­eral enter­tain­ment value to the non-offended, I would be delib­er­ately hurt­ing oth­ers, which is not some­thing to even be con­sid­ered so much as enacted upon. The write-desire isn’t very much around any­more, but the music-bug is reassert­ing its old effect. Maybe instead of mouthing off I should start sax­ing it up again. That’s a good way to spell relief.

I thought I just invented a word, a port­man­teau of man and answer: man­swer. This word would indi­cate a man-standard response to a given ques­tion. Thus,

Ques­tion: “Honey, do these pants make my ass look big?”

Man­swer: “Baby, you look great in every­thing you wear.”

or

Ques­tion: “Want another beer?”

Man­swer: “BELCH.”

Turns out the word man­swer already lives at the Urban Dic­tio­nary, and has so for a cou­ple of years. Must just be a case of delayed sub­con­scious par­al­lel inven­tion hoo-ha.

I ran around the sec­ond­hand fur­ni­ture stores and antique strip on Lorain today in search of fur­ni­ture. I’d for­got­ten how ridicu­lously over-priced most of the antique places are com­pared to back in Indi­ana, but I lucked out and found a dude actu­ally inter­ested in sell­ing some mer­chan­dise and finally picked up the exact kind of library table I’ve been look­ing for years. Quar­ter­sawn oak with a mid­dle drawer. I got it and a chair for $130. A bet­ter price than buy­ing some­thing new and not as sturdy.

I’ve also brought back the side­bar posts as my researches on var­i­ous top­ics have been turn­ing up lots of amaz­ing links. Here’s a feed for it.

• Samu­rai Appli­ance Repair­man rules.
• Hyper­Tem­plates has some sweet stuff, but find­ing it is a bitch.
• I swear to God that the pan­han­dling one-legged sax­o­phon­ist that sits out­side the West Side Mar­ket on Sat­ur­days was play­ing Albert Ayler’s Love Cry today.

I made another col­lage box last week. I’m still lack­ing a crit­i­cal mass of mate­ri­als to choose from but I think this one turned out a bit well despite the restric­tions. It was also a wel­come break from wash­ing wall­pa­per glue, scrap­ing linoleum off of wood floors and notic­ing var­i­ous cock-eyed tip­sies in my 107 year old house.

I’m tak­ing another Flash class today, this time through CSU instead of Tri-C. Not only is it cheaper for a longer time period, but my instruc­tor actu­ally knows what the hell he is talk­ing about instead of con­stantly hav­ing to back­track and recant and fig­ure things out as he goes along like the last dude. I’ve learned more in the first 4 hours today than I did in the entire 6 ses­sion class last time.

I’m Down­town too, at the Cole Cen­ter. I drove in this morn­ing because of the rain, but I’m regret­ting it now since it is absolutely beau­ti­ful out­side, per­fect weather, only per­haps a tad too breezy. I’m so glad we finally got some rain, even as lit­tle as this morning’s fall. I think it is too late for the grass this year, but at least I’m not going to have to worry about a yard-sized fire hazard.

I’m anx­iously await­ing this week­end. I’m going to Chicago to meet my friend and for the Pitch­fork music fes­ti­val. My mom asked if this was a Satanic fes­ti­val because of the “pitch­fork.” She’s been ask­ing me if things I’m going to or doing are Satanic for at least 12 years. You’d think she would have fig­ured out whether I’m a Satanist or not by now.

Oh yeah, just ran across this: OK X — A trib­ute of OK Com­puter by con­tem­po­rary bands. Free download.

I’ve come to enjoy rid­ing my bike to work, even on days like today when it is 82 degrees at 7:30 in the morn­ing. It saves me money and is good exer­cise. For me it doesn’t take much longer than dri­ving either. Time seems to be the #1 fac­tor that peo­ple ask about; there seems to be an assump­tion that rid­ing a bike is a waste of time when a car can zip along much faster. In the long run that is true, but at the same time in a car a per­son doesn’t get much exer­cise, unless they’re yelling with road rage. I look at my bike ride not as trans­porta­tion time, but as exer­cise time. Bik­ing is very much the most effi­cient reg­u­lar means of trans­porta­tion for me. The time dif­fer­ence is neg­li­gi­ble, the cost sav­ings is enor­mous, and the exer­cise is good for me. I decided to do some cal­cu­la­tions. To see just how well it is work­ing out.

I used this Bicy­cle Ride Calo­rie Cal­cu­la­tor and the Gmaps Pedome­ter. And I also did some math on the cost sav­ings as well. First the Exercise.

My route, accord­ing to the Gmaps Pedome­ter, is 3.3 miles each way. A total of 6.6 miles a day, or 33 miles a week. The ride takes me 40 min­utes round trip, unless the wind is par­tic­u­larly pow­er­ful. Plug­ging in other details results in 220 calo­ries burned per day, rid­ing to and from work. That’s about 130 work days if I ride from May through Octo­ber. I’m not going to take off days for rain or any­thing like that since it prob­a­bly bal­ances out based on the fact that I can prob­a­bly ride in April and Novem­ber as well. So, 130 days. That’s 28,600 calo­ries, or just over 8 pounds. We’re also ignor­ing car­dio impact and mus­cu­lar impact from rid­ing up the hills in the Flats.

Now, on to cost. Park­ing in the lot behind my build­ing is $100/month. That’s $600 saved from May through Octo­ber if I drove. Say I have to fill up once a month [cur­rently it is about every 6–8 weeks] and that the fill-up costs $40. That’s $240 saved from May through Octo­ber. I’ll ignore car insur­ance and ser­vic­ing. That’s $840 saved in six months, just from rid­ing a bike.

If I took the RTA, which I do in the win­ter, a monthly pass is $58. Rid­ing my bike to work instead of tak­ing the RTA saves me $348 from May through October.

• $840 saved ver­sus driving
• $348 saved ver­sus RTA
• I’m in bet­ter shape.

I don’t see a downside.

And since the num­bers are sit­ting there, win­ter bus-riding saves me $492 ver­sus dri­ving. I could talk about envi­ron­men­tal impacts of low­er­ing my carbon-footprint and the ben­e­fits of liv­ing and work­ing down­town as well, but I’m tired of doing math when I could be out walk­ing around my new ‘hood.

I have exactly 15 ft³ of books. Not all of them are pic­tured. I am wor­ried that 15 ft³ is too few? I can build a sweet fort out of them though. I can’t fig­ure out if I have too much crap or not. Pack­ing things typ­i­cally makes me run across stuff that makes me think WTF, but I seem to have rid myself of most of that detri­tus. I’m still gonna have a yard sale soon, or whatever.

Today I also deter­mined that awk­ward is an awkword.

This post is too short for the image so here are a few extra words. Back to packing.

You know social net­work­ing has jumped the shark when your uni­ver­sity cre­ates its own social net­work­ing site. It is a bit prim­i­tive, but they’ve got a thing where you can add your own HTML snip­pets. Could be good, could be bad. If they don’t have it locked down, some­one could send some seri­ous vir­u­lence through it. I still pre­fer my MySpace. It has bet­ter music.

Thanks for the add, yo!

Buy­ing a house is ridicu­lously stress­ful. I’ve never had to jump through so many hoops, had so many balls to jug­gle and peo­ple and things and doc­u­ments and who knows what to coor­di­nate in my entire life. I’ve been on the ball the whole time, but wait­ing for other folks to catch up or fol­low through gets fairly annoy­ing. I just had a scare because my real estate agent called me up and said I needed proof of res­i­dency from my land­lord for the title agency. This is two days before clos­ing, mind you, and my land­lord is out of town for who knows how long. Turns out my banker had sup­plied them with the nec­es­sary infor­ma­tion, but I’m still try­ing to get my insur­ance doc­u­ments faxed over to him. He’s been moved around and pro­moted time and time again for the past few months so I’ve got 3 dif­fer­ent phone num­bers, two faxes and an email address that I don’t think he checks very often. Just give me my god­damn keys!

I’ve been mak­ing lots of phone calls to var­i­ous util­i­ties and insur­ance com­pa­nies lately and it appears that I’ve walked into some sort of Alterna-Earth where the auto­mated phone ser­vices I’ve had to uti­lize and the oper­a­tors at the end of the line are all eager to facil­i­tate a swift and hassle-free trans­ac­tion. This started when I called up Cleve­land Pub­lic Power to tell them I was mov­ing. The oper­a­tor was so sin­cerely com­mit­ted to pro­vid­ing good cus­tomer ser­vice that I felt that I had to com­pli­ment her at the end of the phone call. Deal­ing with the gas com­pany wasn’t much bet­ter, but I didn’t have to be on hold for 45 min­utes before being told that I would receive a phone call back at another time. Then I just called Pro­gres­sive to can­cel my auto insur­ance with them. I got a multi-policy dis­count by tak­ing home and auto through the same com­pany, and my auto insur­ance is about $100 cheaper a year because of that too, for the same cov­er­age. Sorry Matt. Their cus­tomer ser­vice was amaz­ing. No push-buttoning at all, I was con­nected imme­di­ately to a human who asked for my pol­icy num­ber right off. In less than two min­utes the pol­icy was can­celed and I’d been informed that a refund would be cred­ited to my credit card.

Hope­fully the actual move will go as smoothly.

After 21 hours in a van with 4 old men this is what I look like. I’m finally back in Cleve­land and despite the excel­lence of my trip, the city was a sight for sore eyes. I had 12 mes­sages once I got cell recep­tion back, most from my banker and real­tor and each more fran­tic than the last. It is a sim­ple mat­ter of an adden­dum to the con­tract to best fit the mort­gage, but appar­ently they weren’t lis­ten­ing when I told them I was going to be out of the coun­try for 10 days. I wish I had one more day to relax before going back to work, but Sun­day is filled with fishy laun­dry, mail piles, iron­ing, beard-bush-whacking and other orga­ni­za­tional flot­sam and jet­sam. I think I’m going to have to blast Pan­tera just to keep the blood pump­ing enough for me to finish.

More pics here.

Day 7 and my trip is mostly at an end. We got up early and made one last jaunt to Lost Lake to get our limit in wall­eye. After return­ing to camp we had a long chore of pack­ing and clean­ing ahead of us before we could enjoy steak night. Now that it is over we have to get up in about 5 hours to hit the road home. The week has been good, the weather bet­ter than hoped for, and the time away from work refresh­ing. I even made an unex­pected new friend who lives in Chicago which seems promising.

I’m not look­ing for­ward to div­ing back in to the stress of work and the final details of home-buying on Monday.

I got up around 5am today and went out with my cousin Luke to cast for pike before the old folks woke up. The night before I beat my Uncle Corbin by 72 points at bid Euchre. Over­all, Luke and my boat had the best day, we came home with 3 wall­eye, one of which was Luke’s tro­phy, a 27-inch pike and a cou­ple of fatass perch. I for­got to take a shower yes­ter­day but man­aged one today before tak­ing a nap while the pic­tures uploaded. I don’t think I’ll be going out to fish tonight, and since we’re so close to our limit, no one prob­a­bly will. We’re hav­ing chicken teriyaki and pineap­ple upside down cake for dessert.

Best day yet, at Lost Lake. I caught another tro­phy wall­eye and we tied our boats together and ate lunch in the mid­dle of the lake. We’re eat­ing fish again tonight so that we can go out and fish more tomor­row. We’re sit­ting right at our limit for the next half hour or so, then we’ll be at about half-limit post-fish fry. We’re run­ning low on alco­hol, so we’re going to have to run into town tomor­row to get more. I think we’re either going to play Texas Hold’em or Euchre tonight after din­ner. The Lost Lake trip is a long ride so we’re not going back out tonight.

Day 3 sucked. I didn’t catch a damn thing worth keep­ing. Today was almost as slow, but I caught a 24.5 inch, 4 pound tro­phy wall­eye, which made up for the drought. We’ve had some seri­ous thun­der­storms, too. Thun­der and light­ning rattle-cabining. My neck was ridicu­lously stiff yes­ter­day, so Luke lent me a Vicodin and a mus­cle relaxer which made me lim­ber enough to con­tin­ues fish­ing. Thank­fully I’m resis­tant to painkillers. We’re bak­ing some wall­eye tonight and will be eat­ing shortly. We’ll be back on the lake in a few hours. I’m a bit sun­burned, and the game face in the photo is delib­er­ately seri­ous. Woo!

Another good day of fish­ing, although the after-dinner fish­ing trip was less-manned due to scotch and thun­der­storms. I only caught a mid-sized wall­eye, unfor­tu­nately, but my boat dri­ving skills gave Corbin some nice catches. One of his friends caught a nice 34.5 inch North­ern Pike that we released so some­one else will have the chance to catch it in the future. My gump­tion helped my euchre team win one of the games and made Drunk Corbin [on the other team] go just a lit­tle crazy. Heh. The rain inter­fered with the satel­lite inter­net, which is why this update comes on the morn­ing of Day 3. Time to eat some omelets.

The Junior Boys lasted 4 min­utes until the first com­plaint, so I ended up rid­ing with Luke in his new truck; much bet­ter for all par­ties involved. First day at the lake resulted in 8 keep­ers, although 6 would have been bet­ter, one wall­eye and one sauger were a bit under­sized for my lik­ing. We ate seven and froze one wall­eye. I caught the tri­fecta north­ern pike, wall­eye, perch. Noth­ing worth keep­ing but the fat lit­tle bait­stealer. It is beau­ti­ful here, no stars blot­ted out by light pol­lu­tion and quiet except for loons and beaver tail. Obvi­ously, there is also unex­pected WiFi in a place where the near­est radio sta­tion is Radio Win­nipeg, which barely comes in on AM. Good night and good luck.

Post-game pan­de­mo­nium. Com­ing back from Rafeeq’s; tit­ties on top of Honda Civics on West 25th [they cease to be breasts and become tit­ties when dis­played as such] and Escalades blaz­ing at the Lorain stop light. Streets filled with hoots and hollers. Rise up, moth­er­fuck­ers. Rise. Up.

[Update: “two more honda civics were stolen in the hood last night…” I also for­got to men­tion that I made a half­time junior bacon cheese­burger run to Wendy’s in about ten min­utes, round trip.]

I’ve had this rash that has recently become a full body thing; it itches like a cayenne por­cu­pine. Mir­a­cle of mir­a­cles, I man­aged to get not one, but two doctor’s appoint­ments today; one with my pri­mary care physi­cian and one with a der­ma­tol­o­gist. I was pleased to dis­cover that every lifestyle ques­tion they asked about was answered in the healthy direc­tion, but what I wasn’t so pleased about was the diag­no­sis. I’m aller­gic to sun­light. Poly­mor­phus Light Erup­tion, to be exact. I ended up get­ting a cor­ti­sone shot over the week­end to reduce my scratch-madness, and today I got dumped on with 4 pre­scrip­tions, two steroids and two allergy pills. I’m sup­posed to wear 30 SPF sun­screen all the time now, too. Boy in the moth­er­fuck­ing bub­ble. Thank­fully my County health care kicked in at the begin­ning of the month, oth­er­wise I’d be up itch creek with­out a backscratcher. The days are much too bright.

I’m putting a bid in on a house today. This is seri­ous busi­ness. I think that I’ve done as much research, plan­ning and judg­ment as pos­si­ble. I’ve con­sulted friends, neigh­bors, coun­try­men, undoc­u­mented immi­grants, stray cats, augurer and harus­pex. I’ve even done the math n times. Every­thing seems to be work­ing out. Even with all of that, I’m still ridicu­lously ner­vous. I feel like I’m miss­ing or for­get­ting some­thing. Mom is the only one who thinks I’m mov­ing too quickly, it may be this that is trou­bling me, since I respect her expe­ri­ence. The place is a two-unit colo­nial built in 1900, on a sta­ble res­i­den­tial street and off-street park­ing. Even with­out a ten­ant upstairs, the mort­gage should be eas­ily afford­able. I’m jumpy. What!

One of my cowork­ers told me that I’m bowl-legged today. This is true. I tend to walk as if my insteps are tread­ing an invis­i­ble line. Despite my bowl-leggedness, I still get knock-kneed, espe­cially when run­ning or around a pretty woman. All of this sup­ports my the­ory that my legs tend to oper­ate as a dis­tinct entity if I don’t keep an eye on them, and because of this I’m in a con­stant state of falling. Only my super­hu­man agility keeps me from hit­ting the ground…most of the time.

My buddy hooked me up with two suite tick­ets to the Indi­ans v. Twins game last night. Free beer, free food, seats to the right of behind home plate, a flat screen TV with the Cavs game on inside the heated room, et cetera. At one point he checked out­side and noticed that every­one in all of the other suites were ignor­ing the Indi­ans game in favor of watch­ing the Cavs. I knew a few of the peo­ple there, but spent most of the time talk­ing to a new friend. I real­ize this morn­ing that I was a bit drunker than I thought last night. Should’ve eaten more.

Today, after miss­ing it for two con­sec­u­tive years due to not being suf­fi­ciently com­mit­ted to in-the-loopness, I finally made it to a Punk Rock Soft­ball game. I real­ized that no one who does it really likes to call it Punk Rock Soft­ball, which is appro­pri­ate. I prob­a­bly dimin­ished its punk­ness by my mere pres­ence, and the fact that I wigged out and brought sig­nif­i­cant amounts of food to grill on my grill. It was fun, lasted all after­noon, and I real­ized that while I never had enough base­ball abil­ity to please my dad, I’m good enough to be mid­dling at an infor­mal drunken game of softball.

The game ended with a tie, since folks wanted to get gone and watch the Cavs play­off game, but I went to look at a cou­ple of houses, one of them for the sec­ond time. I really like it, it is a two-unit on a nice street in South Tremont, in solid con­di­tion, need­ing, for the most part, super­fi­cial and cos­metic adjust­ments. I’ve been call­ing on my expe­ri­enced neigh­bor home-owner net­work for sup­port and infor­ma­tion, and I still need to sit down and recrunch num­bers to make sure I’m ready to go; but, for the most part, I’m excited to be mov­ing for­ward with my life. Maybe before the year is out, I’ll actu­ally have my own dog! Although home-owning isn’t very punk rock. Or maybe it is, from a cer­tain perspective.

I don’t drive very much any­more, but the last two days I’ve been at the Tri-C Cor­po­rate Col­lege West tak­ing a class. What I’ve noticed on the drive to West­lake these two days is a pre­pon­der­ance of W04 stick­ers, Kerry-Edwards stick­ers and now the odd Obama08 sticker. I’m pretty sure I’ve bitched about this before, but I can’t ascribe the remain­ing bumper stick­ers to removal-laziness. If party-line-toeing and bipar­ti­san divi­sive­ness is so strong among the generic cit­i­zen that peo­ple can’t let go 2.5 years after the fact, it isn’t sur­pris­ing that the peo­ple we’ve elected can’t or won’t get any­thing accomplished.

My cur­rent focus is bring­ing my web acces­si­bil­ity, Sec­tion 508, and other usabil­ity guide­lines to a higher level. To that end, The Uni­ver­sity of Washington’s mas­sive and extremely use­ful Acces­si­bil­ity site has been a great help. And I only found it yesterday.

I’d say I’ve smelled some­one smok­ing up in down­town Cleve­land at least six times since I started work that­away. Usu­ally on Ontario right before Pub­lic Square, but once I smelled it oh so briefly, on the bus, on Carnegie Bridge, right above the Cuyahoga.

I think the neigh­bor­hood skunk or one of its prog­eny has made its way to my neck of the woods, many morn­ings when I leave it smells like a wood pussy has been nearby.

I’ve been using a health-food-esque deodor­ant for the past year, just a stick of salt, but I had to buy some chem­i­cally engi­neered stuff for post-gym odor­if­e­roc­ity. This stuff is called “Ice Dive” but smells exactly like a grapefruit.

Club Soda does mir­a­cle work on my pots and pans. When the metal is still spotty after a wash I can pour a lit­tle club soda in the pan, let it sit for a bit and then wash it again and they pretty much dis­ap­pear. Sweet Jesus!

My Dell lap­top is right at two years old and is start­ing to dis­in­te­grate on me. The sound only works if I plug a jack into it, the for­ward slash key only works if you press the top-right cor­ner and the whole she-bang is get­ting bogged down because of my inabil­ity to refor­mat the bas­tard. Thank you, Dell, for refus­ing to send me a backup disk and putting a hid­den par­ti­tion on the machine with­out ask­ing me first.

I really want to get a Mac or Mac­Book Pro, but I would feel rather irre­spon­si­ble get­ting a new machine after only two years.

Although I’m no Jeff Schuler or Andy Timithy in terms of hard­core bik­ing, I think I’m going to start rid­ing my bike to work come Monday.

I was gonna grill on Sun­day but it looks like thunderstorms.

I got my order from Toms Shoes yes­ter­day. They are as com­fort­able as they say. I didn’t believe it. But the best part is that my pur­chase bought a pair of shoes for a shoe­less kid as well. All Toms Shoes pur­chases do that. If you decide to get some, you can use the dis­count code 1PAIR4FEET at the check­out to get a fiver off the price. Basi­cally free shipping.

Fin­ished Herodotus, con­vinced he’s the first weblog­ger. Back to Agee and U.S. Guys by Char­lie LeDuff.

Prob­a­bly gonna go see Antaeus Dance tonight since just about every­one I know is in the per­for­mance, includ­ing the afore­men­tioned JS.

I took a Pho­to­Shop class all day today just down the street from my office. I learned a met­ric fuck­ton of info that I can’t wait to put into prac­tice. I used to won­der what could be so impor­tant that busi­ness folks would be on their cell­phones all the time, but I was wor­ried about the deliv­ery of the ISC Annual Report since I was the main moti­va­tor at get­ting a few copies printed and bound nicely. They were due yes­ter­day, and last I knew they still hadn’t been deliv­ered. They’re due tomor­row, by law, to the ADP Board, so I was hitch­ing back down the street on breaks and mak­ing phone calls to check on the everything.

And the thing is, I don’t mind it. I love the fact that I’m trusted to imple­ment my ideas and expected to suc­ceed at them. My judg­ment is trusted and I love that responsibility.

I got lucky tonight when the power went off at my [mostly worth­less] Flash class at the Tri-C Cor­po­rate Col­lege. We left early, which meant I had time to play pseudo-catch-up on all the crap that has been pil­ing up at my apart­ment. I used to won­der how it could be pos­si­ble that some­one might not have enough time to read, but with the three vol­un­teer projects I’m cur­rently work­ing on, the free­lance work, my reg­u­lar 9–5 and other unseen events, I now have a huge pile of read­ing. I’ve already renewed the Agee book of film reviews twice and Herodotus once. Inci­den­tally, read­ing Herodotus is a lot like read­ing a weblog. I’m two months behind on my Paste sub­scrip­tion, so I’ve def­i­nitely got to catch up on that.

I man­aged to watch a Cri­te­rion film twice tonight. Hope­fully I’ll be able to fin­ish the review tomor­row. I was pseudo-MetaFiltered when some­one linked to my Cri­te­rion Project in another post about some­one who intends to watch all of the films. I only got about a 30% increase in traf­fic, [took me for­ever to remem­ber the pass­word to check my web­stats] which is good. If I had been linked on the front page, I’d prob­a­bly have to pay a hefty server bill this month.

Check­ing the web­stats revealed that the string that keeps result­ing in hits for my site is “rape scenes” ever since, way back when, I reviewed Straw Dogs. And now I prob­a­bly just increased the chance of my site show­ing up in that result by writ­ing it here. DON’T INDEX THIS, BOT!

Going to sleep now. I’ll be bowl­ing for Har­vest for Hunger tomor­row at the Cor­ner Alley. I was shang­haied by the Depart­ment of Devel­op­ment when they lost a per­son. The County Com­mis­sion­ers are bowl­ing against City offi­cials tomor­row before us nobody’s get to work. I haven’t bowled in a few years but I fully intend to kick everyone’s ass.

While I might think I’m improv­ing my over­rall mus­cu­lar fit­ness, I’m still built like a shit brick­house. I got a new work­out sched­ule yes­ter­day and I’m cer­tain it is going to tear me apart. This is good.

After a work­out I don’t want to lis­ten to Mastodon or Tad Morose, or any other tech­ni­cal metal any­more so I’m pleased when my iPod shuf­fle plays some mel­low gui­tar tunage, what I like to call wasted blues, down-tempo half-drunken stuff, usu­ally some­thing from the Fat Pos­sum cat­a­log, or some­thing with a relax­ing Spanish-influence. Indie Rock is not good after sweat. Nor is it good ante-sweat. I like elec­tronic or indus­trial stuff to get my blood flow­ing before I attempt to hurt myself.

I’ve been work­ing out at least three times a week since mid-December and I sup­pose that changes are start­ing to take place. I’m lift­ing more and might be putting on some weight, but for the life of me I can’t seem to get a decent ab-workout. I used to have this killer one that I picked up from the cheer­lead­ing squad at ND, it would really kick my ass; hun­dreds of ab-doobers in a ses­sion. Unless I’ve for­got­ten some­thing or am doing things incor­rectly, this work­out isn’t doing much any­more. The gym has med­i­cine balls to help out, and I think I’m going to start doing at least the ab work­out and pushups even on off days.

Now that the weather is pick­ing up, I’m ready to run again. I find myself sniff­ing the air and hop­ping around like a goon.

These are pretty much what I thought they’d be.

Today is a bit nos­tal­gic of col­lege, a 15 hour day, left when it is dark and won’t get home until it is time to go to bed. I’m at the Tri-C Cor­po­rate Col­lege right now tak­ing a Flash course on the county’s dime. We’re on break right now, so no worries.

Books rec­om­mended:
Macro­me­dia Flash Pro­fes­sional 8 Hands-On Train­ing
Learn­ing Action­Script 2.0 for Macro­me­dia Flash 8

We’re using this book:
Macro­me­dia Flash Pro­fes­sional 8 Revealed

Sites rec­om­mended:
LearnFlash.com
lynda.com
swishzone.com

Okay, break is over, back to learn.

On my way to work this morn­ing I con­grat­u­lated myself on the fact that I had not slipped and fallen dur­ing the entire win­ter. You can see where this is going. The only pos­si­ble con­clu­sion that can be reached is that such self-congratulation only draws atten­tion to yourself.

I sure hope hav­ing four more weeks of extra sun­light this year doesn’t increase global warming.

Web

Kirupa — Tuto­ri­als on all kinds of web-oriented things.
GoTo and Learn — Flash Tuto­ri­als
Obscure Tags — HTML tags that should never have existed in the first place.

Music

RIAA Radar –Deter­mine if an album belongs to an RIAA mem­ber. Check out their charts.

Arty

Prickie — But­tons.
Readymech — Print, cut and make cool lit­tle critters.

Clothes

Veer Gear
TOMS Shoes — For every pair sold, another one is donated to a kid in need.

Gam­ing

Rap­pelz — Free RPG

Pol­i­tics

Open­Congress — Keep track of Hill-business and Congress-critters.

I think the most impor­tant thing I’ve ever learned from my mom [by her exam­ple] is that if you have an idea or a project that you believe in you have to inter­nal­ize the nec­es­sary work to accom­plish the goal, take respon­si­bil­ity for all of its aspects and get to work. If you wait for someone’s per­mis­sion or help you’ll never get it off the ground. Its a mature and prag­matic form of ini­tia­tive and it isn’t flashy or earth-shattering, but it’s a qual­ity which is great for the long-haul, which is more use­ful anyway.

I’ve noticed that a typ­i­cal Cleve­land res­i­dent often ends state­ments with the par­tic­u­late phrase “or what­ever.” Seman­ti­cally it seems to be the equiv­a­lent in func­tion as “I guess”, a sort of simul­ta­ne­ous space-filler and dis­mis­sive qual­i­fier; an inten­tional addi­tion so that the speaker feels that he or she isn’t being over­con­fi­dent in their state­ment or bear­ing. I noticed this habit creep­ing into my speech and had to put a stop to it. I might not always be as con­cise as pos­si­ble, or enun­ci­ate clearly, but I think my speech is pretty cruft­less in other wise. Now that I’ve mostly rid myself of this Cleveland-specific ten­dency, or what­ever, I’ve started notic­ing it more and more often in other people’s usage. This abil­ity of mine, almost a con­fir­ma­tion bias, only really annoys me in music, as there are cer­tain songs that I’ll notice a tiny piece of sam­pled pro­duc­tion, and then can never merge it back into the sound­scape after­ward, or whatever.

I think the Dave’s in Ohio City must’ve had its High Life license revoked because the cooler was scoured bare of that shit.

I almost never visit BFD any­more because the con­ver­sa­tion reminds me of Fea­gler and Friends. It has been that way for months now.

The most dif­fi­cult part of work­ing in web and graphic design so far seems to be a com­mu­ni­ca­tion prob­lem that cre­ates a ten­sion between design and usabil­ity. The dif­fi­culty seems to lie in the fact that most clients have a very gen­er­al­ized idea of what they want in a site and this is almost always a design-oriented idea. Yet they usu­ally lack the vocab­u­lary to express their idea in a way that a design team can under­stand. From my end it some­times feels like a client thinks they are the designer and we just do the work, espe­cially when we keep get­ting sent back to the draw­ing board due to inef­fec­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion and the ulti­mate design is both poor and unus­able. In the end this doesn’t just hurt the client-creative rela­tion­ship, but also affects those the client wishes to com­mu­ni­cate to. I’m sure this is a com­mon occur­rence in many pro­fes­sions, when a layper­son calls shots that make no sense to the tech­ni­cal imple­menter. Dri­ves me bonkers when it results in a com­pletely unus­able web­site though. Actu­ally, I’ve no prob­lem mak­ing a crap­tac­u­lar piece of work if I’m sure that the client actu­ally under­stands that there are other ways of doing it that would be bet­ter in both design and usabil­ity. After all, they’re the one pay­ing for it.

My Paste mag­a­zine sub­scrip­tion is whacked out. I got March’s issue before February’s and after I con­tacted them [a great cus­tomer ser­vice response by the way] I’ve received two Feb­ru­ary issues. They just switched from bimonthly to monthly so I bet that is what happened.

Now that the Acad­emy Awards are over AMC is going to go back to show­ing High Plains Drifter 24/7 again. I wish I had TCM or IFC instead. UPDATE: HOLY SHIT HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER IS ON AMC RIGHT NOW.

My freezer is full of Thin Mint Girl Scout Cook­ies and pork shoulders.

I’ve put on 5 pounds in the last 2 days. Water weight I’m sure.

I’m going to go to the VTR tomor­row for a cou­ple of Bour­bon Daisies and some sushi. I’ll be there around 5pm.

I think I’m finally fully recov­ered. It only cost me ten pounds, a few nights’ sleep and three rolls of toi­let paper. Now I’m try­ing to get back into a rou­tine. I won­der how this has messed up my work­out sched­ule. I’ll fig­ure that out tomor­row. I’m hav­ing a win­ter bar­be­cue next Sat­ur­day so I’ve got plenty of prepa­ra­tion to do for that, includ­ing a full slash and burn of my apart­ment, which has rarely been filth­ier. My read­ing has really piled up as well. I’ve got two mag­a­zines, four books of poetry and that book of Agee film crit­i­cism to go through, as well as a cou­ple of rough draft poems [one of which was posted pre­ma­turely] to finish.

Instead of doing any of that, I’ve spent the day watch­ing shitty sci­ence fic­tion movies like The Chron­i­cles of Rid­dick, Van Hels­ing and League of Extra­or­di­nary Gen­tle­men. Buh.

$434.94 is what Domin­ion thinks I owe for gas in the month of February.

I hate hav­ing food poisoning.

I’ll be damned if I didn’t think I was going to make it through this win­ter with­out becom­ing filled with dis­con­tented rage as my pecu­liar form of SAD takes effect. The day started out with me get­ting com­pletely ignored by the bus as it zoomed past its stop, and steadily dis­in­te­grated when I got to work to find a small shit­pile of hate mail about the new county site; includ­ing one gem from a cer­tain “impor­tant” res­i­dent of my neigh­bor­hood. After work, I decided to do my laun­dry and some dude zipped past me as I was load­ing it into my car and sprayed my laun­dry with filthy slush. I also real­ized that I have the equiv­a­lent of another full time job in vol­un­teer work right now, so that I’m neglect­ing Tremon­ter and my per­sonal site. Some­thing has to give, and it won’t be me, dammit.

I’m watch­ing Sponge­bob Squarepants right now and it is totally ref­er­enc­ing Bruce Lee’s last, uncom­pleted film Game of Death. where he climbs the pagoda. The whole episode is Sandy Cheeks climb­ing the pagoda, and she’s even wear­ing the yel­low with black rac­ing stripe jump­suit that Lee wears.

Man, I’m such a geek.

Now that I’ve got­ten back into an exer­cise rou­tine, my old appetite is com­ing back. Yes­ter­day after lift­ing weights I was rav­en­ous. I ended up get­ting a 3 egg omelet with home fries and a side of fruit salad for break­fast from Juji’s. Lunch was light, a peanut-butter pro­tein smoothie from Octane, but I had two din­ners. A mess of broc­coli and feta with some smoked sausage, and then a bit later, a big bowl of oat­meal and some toast. I was just as hun­gry when I woke up this morn­ing as well.

Unless I’ve for­got­ten just how much I can eat, I think my appetite might actu­ally be larger than usual. This has got to be due to the fact that I’m lift­ing weights con­sis­tently for the first time in, well, ever. My upper body is so not-buff that my body must be going through some­thing akin to the reju­ve­na­tion that took place to my left leg once I could start the recu­per­at­ing from my sec­ond kneecap dis­lo­ca­tion. Since I’ve got sig­nif­i­cant help from the gym, I’m also not wor­ried that I’ll injure myself due to igno­rance. I don’t feel buff yet, but just wait until I start car­ry­ing around empty pop cans so I can crush them against my head.

I’ve almost been run over twice more since the near miss two days ago. Yes­ter­day I was walk­ing to the gym, about ¾ of the way across W. 4th Street when some guy in a z4 nearly clips my feet off turn­ing onto W. 4th. He prob­a­bly took that cor­ner at about 30mph, which is impres­sive con­sid­er­ing the fact that W. 4th is about 15ft wide. In any­thing other than a sports car he would have had to slow down.

This morn­ing I was wait­ing for the 23 and it was com­ing, so I stepped up to the curb bus stop. It didn’t even slow down, and its cor­ner almost clipped me and another dude that was stand­ing there. I feel like I’m in a stu­pid hor­ror movie.

They say that if there is a hit our for you, you’re sup­posed to avoid rou­tine, take dif­fer­ent routes to work, never shop in the same place twice, move often. I walk a dif­fer­ent route to work each day along the same street. Euclid has been under­go­ing infra­struc­ture surgery for quite some time. When morn­ing comes I won­der which side­walk will be closed, which home­less man will be dis­placed from his cor­ner and which store­front is going to be a bit more tor­porous. Cur­rently some pipes that were worked on less than a month ago are being exca­vated from side­walk that was laid last week. This seems to be stan­dard pro­ce­dure. What­ever seems pris­tine must be hid­ing some­thing. This seems strange in a world where straight is the only direc­tion it is pos­si­ble to travel. Later, my boss and I were almost crushed by a semi that cruised through an old red light.

Peo­ple keep telling me to run for an elected office, and my auto­matic response is always leer­i­ness. The hier­ar­chi­cal nature of any bureau­cracy restricts ini­tia­tive and that’s my main strength. There’s also always too much talk and too lit­tle action. I’ve been to far too many meet­ings and read far too many weblogs where peo­ple feel per­fectly com­fort­able telling how things should be, but do no work them­selves to make those things come about. Action­less pol­icy ide­o­logues are really just pub­lic masturbators.

My mother used to always sing the patience song to me, but it never stuck, and my nat­ural impa­tience becomes ini­tia­tive when I put it into action. I can’t count the num­ber of times this year that peo­ple have asked me if I’m run­ning for the board of TWDC. There was a time when I thought that work­ing for TWDC would be good for me and the neigh­bor­hood, but now I can bet­ter appre­ci­ate the strengths of unaf­fil­i­a­tion; much in the same way that I refuse to be affil­i­ated with a polit­i­cal party. I don’t have to play favorites, focus my work on appeas­ing someone’s ego, or lick any boots. I’m my own boss and I get much more accom­plished that way.

So I did a mild redesign. Not much changed on the front end, but I basi­cally coded this one from scratch and it is 50% less crufty and 50% more cro­mu­lent than before.

I had a half-formed thought last night about how moments are pre­cious because most of them get lost to mem­ory dur­ing the abyss of time that is life; life always seems short because we for­get most of it. So each moment has to be used up to the last nub­bin, because even if we for­get it, we’ll know it wasn’t wasted.

• Join­ing var­i­ous indie-rock Soulseek chat rooms and ask­ing peo­ple if they have X song by Y artist that is on the Top 40 list and act­ing all hurt and offended when they tell me they don’t lis­ten to that crap and to chris­sakes try the search func­tion you dumb­fuck.
• XHTML strict web design.
• It’s Been Awhile by Staind, Dead or Alive by Bon Jovi, Spice Up Your Life by The Spice Girls, How You Remind Me by Nick­el­back, Billy Joel, Queen.
• Kraft Sin­gles.
• Irish exits.
• Say­ing delib­er­ately ambiguous/mean things that can be taken seri­ously or not seri­ously and leav­ing the other per­son to fig­ure out which I truly mean. You know who you are.

I’ve been in Cleve­land less than 48 hours and I’m head­ing off for a New Year’s in Canada. Even­tu­ally I’ll have a cou­ple of reg­u­lar weeks to estab­lish some sort of rou­tine, but until then it is party time, excellent.

Well, I’m back in Cleve­land after a few days in Indi­ana. Three Christ­mas gifts I’m excited about include my new sweet-ass pots and pans set, my iron­ing board, and my sub­scrip­tion to Paste [it comes with a comp CD every month!]

The top Christ­mas moment was on Box­ing Day when I came into the fam­ily room dur­ing the after­noon to find my mom, my aunt and my uncle all fast asleep and Mat­lock on the television.

Oh yeah, in honor of James Brown’s pass­ing here’s a short film called Beat the Devil star­ring him and directed by Tony Scott. About the only place you’re going to find this film is on YouTube unless you man­age to stum­ble across one of the lim­ited release BMW Films DVDs. The rest of the DVD is good too, all shorts by great directors.

I did a cheap hack of this YouTube Word­press plu­gin to make it func­tion like a sub­scrip­tion to my vid feed. I’m sure there is a bet­ter way to hack it, but until I have a chance to sit down and exam­ine it, the result on the side­bar will have to do. I’m cur­rently redesign­ing from scratch, but the intended final design won’t be much dif­fer­ent from what it is cur­rently. I’m exper­i­ment­ing with meet­ing 508 stan­dards and mak­ing the site read­able on hand­held devices in addi­tion to val­i­dat­ing as strict XHTML. I think I’m becom­ing one of those web designers…

I signed up for a mem­ber­ship at the gym two blocks from my work­place yes­ter­day and got up at 5:30am this morn­ing and rode the 23 in for my first work­out. I feel like I’m in the worst shape of my life, and I likely am, so I made sure to take it easy. There is a room where they have group exer­cise, but as none of the classes are sched­uled until 8 or so, I have it all to myself for some basic cal­is­then­ics and happy-joy fenc­ing foot­work. I did that for about twenty min­utes, had a good long stretch and then ran for a half hour on the tread­mill and watched some dude stab an inflat­able snow­man on tele­vi­sion. A set of crunches later and I hit the show­ers: with­out a towel. [This over­sight will be reme­died tomor­row.] There is also a room at Fit­works [warn­ing: noise] where they show movies, a sort of tread­mill cine­plex, where peo­ple can run in the dark and zone out. They were show­ing Christ­mas at the Kranks yes­ter­day. I won­der if I can con­vince them to play Cri­te­rion films…

One block from work is a CVS, where I imag­ine I’ll be get­ting my post-workout break­fasts. I bought some yogurt and gra­nola bars today. Rid­ing the gym, in the dark, on the bus, lis­ten­ing to Orion by Metal­lica, I felt like I was hav­ing a real-life train­ing montage.

The city steams on win­ter morn­ings
like a spent horse
buses squall
in the dark

lock­ers hold ties
and work boots

another
heart pumps legs
pump heat hunts for
release—

pow­er­ing this
restive beast called Cleveland.

I’ve been uti­liz­ing YouTube more often lately. I took some video at Poetry at the Lit the other night and below is a vid I took of The Ex at the Grog Shop on Saturday.

You can watch all of my vids here. I just need to find a YouTube ver­sion of the Flickr RSS plu­gin for Wordpress.

I love my new job. I work with a great and diverse group of folks. an Uzbeki, a Russ­ian, an Indian, a Brit, and a 1st-generation Amer­i­can whose par­ents came from Pales­tine. The work is also great. My bosses also have their act together, pro­gres­sive skill-building ini­tia­tives and just a gen­eral under­stand­ing that when employ­ees are treated like peo­ple they work well. It is such a switch from my old place, where I’ve heard of 4 addi­tional peo­ple leav­ing since I put in my notice.

I’ve fig­ured out the best bus route to take too. If I wait at the cor­ner of W 14th and Stark­weather I can pick up either the 81 or the 23, whichever comes first. If the 6 or E-Line trol­ley isn’t at Pub­lic Square when I hop off it is faster to just walk to E. 12th Street. Get­ting home there is a stop just south of Pub­lic Square where I can pick up the 81 or 23 again. The 23 is the best one to catch since there are fewer stops between where I get on it and where I get off it. I did end up walk­ing home from McCarthy’s in the Flats on Thurs­day at 7pm with­out see­ing one bus head­ing my direc­tion in the 45 min­utes it took me to get home though, so there are still sig­nif­i­cant problems.

But not dri­ving or hav­ing to deal with traf­fic has mel­lowed me as well. Remov­ing the neg­a­tive aspects of my envi­ron­ment has made me hap­pier than I’ve been in a long time. I’m on the right path.

You can pre­vent a match or can­dle wick from exces­sively smok­ing if you con­tinue to blow on it after the flame has gone out. This mes­sage was brought to you by the Ex-Altar Boy Soci­ety for the Pre­ven­tion of Exces­sively Smok­ing Matches and Can­dle Wicks.

That, my friends, is it. No more shop­ping until I see some cro­cuses. Although I do wish I could wrap a bit more. I’m finally get­ting pretty good at it. I think I’d bet­ter mail my Christ­mas cards this week­end, too. And start gloat­ing to the peo­ple who haven’t even started yet. Which is what this post is for.

My new job is awe­some, but it keeps me busier than a mon­key restau­rant. I’ve also had meet­ings every night this week, and I have to leave in about 20 min­utes and go to another one, and then go watch Parts and Labor this evening at Pat’s. Last night was The Cleve­land Foun­da­tion hol­i­day party for Neigh­bor­hood Con­nec­tions and we were fed from #1 Pho, cake from Corbo’s and a silly gift exchange. The Foun­da­tion also gave all of the com­mit­tee mem­bers at $50 gift card to Tower City.

My affair with the RTA may be short-lived as I’ve heard rumor of a county park­ing lot that is just as inex­pen­sive if not more so than a monthly pass. If it is true I think I’ll lean in favor of warm feet, a half hour saved on my com­mute to work and increased pol­lu­tion. My dress shoes are already show­ing signs of dete­ri­o­ra­tion from stand­ing in ankle deep snow for a cou­ple of hours this week wait­ing for the bus.

I cel­e­brated Repeal Day at the Vel­vet Tango Room yes­ter­day with a Rusty Nail, a bou­quet of Bour­bon Daisies and some com­pli­men­tary sushi from Ginza.

The first day at my new gig was pretty much as I expected, lots of meet­ing peo­ple and paper­work, but I did get to start out on some mock-up designs for one of our clients. The only bad thing that hap­pened was the RTA. I’d had luck in the past with it, but that was only tak­ing a Rapid route to the Air­port. Try­ing to fig­ure out bus sched­ules is an exer­cise in futil­ity. They really need a fully redesigned site. And bus sched­ules in the empty slots in every bus. And a trip plan­ner that isn’t worth­less. You can’t put in your home address and des­ti­na­tion and get the best route, you have to put in the clos­est bus stop to your source and des­ti­na­tion, which, if you don’t know where one is, makes the fea­ture noth­ing more than a bug. Even once you fig­ure out which stop is clos­est, it might tell you that you have to walk a half mile to a dif­fer­ent stop and will give an esti­mated trip time of 5 min­utes over four miles and includ­ing walk time between trans­fers. And all stops for a bus aren’t listed on the sched­ules. Also, the buses don’t run on Euclid because of the con­struc­tion, but the updated routes aren’t posted.

The RTA pro­vides NO easy way to plan and use their sys­tem. I’m still going to work it out for my own self, because I’m not going to pay $95/mo to park down­town. I just wish I didn’t need a slide rule and sex­tant and zodiac chart to fig­ure out which bus to take.

Just as I was get­ting bored yes­ter­day Rafeeq called me up because he needed a ride to Cracker Park to pick up some shoes. Rafeeq is good for me because he helps me loosen and lighten up. So we got valet park­ing for my car, which, if you’ve seen my car, is hilar­i­ous. We got his kicks and I ordered a pair of brown shoes for $25. Then we wan­dered through Bor­ders and I got my first Christ­mas gift of the year, Sea­mus Heaney’s Selected Poems. I read a bit of it last night, and it promises to be excel­lent. We stayed to watch Casino Royale, which lives up to all of the hype. The open­ing chase sequence fea­tures some com­pletely awe­some and fully inte­grated park­our. [1, 2, 3] It was a great flick and worth the $8.50 ticket price. I hadn’t real­ized how used to the Mar­quee Club Mem­ber­ship I was until I ended up drop­ping full price for a movie ticket. After the movie we shot the shit with the valets, mak­ing fun of the gag­gles of mid­dle school aged per­sons flit­ting around in their shrugs and flip flops in 30 degree weather. ‘Feeq said he couldn’t wait to read what I wrote about the evening. So here it is. I dropped him off and then got my car filled up and washed. So now it is miss­ing even more paint.

I don’t know what’s up lately, but I’ve been hit­ting a wall at about 8:30 every night. Last night I stopped for some deep-fried tacos from Big Guy’s and a few brews from Hotz’s and was back home in time to toss in Yojimbo. I had every inten­tion of going to The Lit after this, but then I started going cross-eyed and next thing you know I wake up, it’s just after nine and the phone is ring­ing. We finally got a good long rain [which is aber­rant this late in the year] to wash the bil­low­ing clouds of dirt that empty dump trucks have been dis­trib­ut­ing all along my street and on everyone’s car. Peo­ple were wash­ing their cars and the next day it looked like they hadn’t been washed in weeks. It was right out of the Dust Bowl.

I did my clothes shop­ping last night, and the bane of my clothes shop­ping exis­tence con­tin­ues. It is impos­si­ble to find pants in my size, espe­cially when I’m look­ing for a cer­tain style. The guy at Dillard’s told me that I should drink more beer until I have a 40-inch waist­line, because then I can shop in the Big and Tall sec­tion. I just want 34x34 flat-front pants with­out cuffs, one or two pairs in wool and one or two pairs with a slight pat­tern. A her­ring­bone would be excel­lent. Two pairs black, one char­coal, one dark brown.

I did man­age to snag a pair of dark blue pants at The Gap for $20 that were in my size, but I refuse to drop $98 for one pair of pants at Express Men, no mat­ter how awe­some they are. I picked up 3 more MX shirts from there, they were on sale and those shirts fit me per­fectly. I finally got some nice black dress shoes as well. They were expen­sive, but if I’m going to be wear­ing them 40 hours a week I want them to be as com­fort­able as pos­si­ble, and these are more com­fort­able than my Spezials.

I start my new job on Mon­day. I met another county employee last night who gave me her card because she wants some work done to her site, and peo­ple keep ask­ing me if I’m going to improve the Audi­tor or Recorder sites. God knows they need it, but those sites are of the few that my divi­sion doesn’t have a hand in. Peo­ple keep direct­ing me to the Sum­mit County site, which has GIS and MIS tools in addi­tion to other great data­base lever­age to serve county res­i­dents. I have a feel­ing I’ll be spend­ing a lot of time look­ing at how other places around the coun­try do their sites in order to get some ideas on usabil­ity and implementation.

I love the fact that I’m in a posi­tion where I can bring the aver­age person’s ideas to the table and maybe imple­ment them if all works out. Even though I’ve not even offi­cially started yet. Even though I wasn’t elected, I’m still hold­ing a pub­lic office, and a respect for ser­vice to the pub­lic was prob­a­bly unknow­ingly instilled in my by my grandpa. That’s some good motivation.

I finally have to wear adult clothes to work, and alas, I don’t really know where to go to get them. Rec­om­men­da­tions have included out­let shop­ping [which I’ll prob­a­bly hit this week­end] and a vari­ety of places that are too expen­sive for my taste. Although The Gap sounds like it might hold pos­si­bil­i­ties and there is one 2 miles from here. Maybe I’ll go there first instead of dri­ving to Lodi.

I watched the clas­sic Christ­mas movie Eyes Wide Shut while wrap­ping gifts last night. Man does that movie suck. It was the only film left in my Stan­ley Kubrick Col­lec­tion that I hadn’t made it all the way through. I’d usu­ally get about ten min­utes in and then glaze over. I did get most of my wrap­ping done, and now I have only a few more things to buy to fin­ish up. Cer­tain peo­ple have been espe­cially dif­fi­cult to buy for this year. I also have a Char­lie Brown Christ­mas tree. I bought a tiny Nor­folk pine, too small even for an orna­ment. Instead of putting presents under it, I’ve had to put the tree on top of them. I’m using red wrap­ping paper and green rib­bon as this year’s theme. I got 100 yards of rib­bon for $6 at Pat Catan’s the other day. I’m sure I’ll be using it for the next 20 years.

My ribs hurt. I feel like I was sacked by a Samoan a few times this week­end. Maybe Andy was using me as a block­ing dummy when I wasn’t looking.

I can now cer­tainly afford a house in Cleve­land. Whether I can afford a house in Tremont is another mat­ter. I’ve done some research in the past [1, 2] and the prog­no­sis wasn’t good. There is an upcom­ing Tremont-wide open house that might be a good chance for me to find some­thing, but it still looks like most of the places are more than I can afford. I don’t want to spend over $80k for a home or $110 for a duplex, but most of what I’ve seen on the mar­ket is going for twice that.

Even the tini­est of houses in the trendy part of Tremont are sell­ing for $85k. This one looks much more promis­ing, although the crime in that part of Tremont is pretty bad. There is a duplex on W.10th, right around the cor­ner from where I live that I’d like to look at, but I can’t find the list­ing for it any­where. There are plenty of options actu­ally, but with prices so inflated in this area, I won­der what the catch is. Nonethe­less I can look and learn all I want.

Here are some that I’ve found in just brief bouts of looking:

• 1054 Holm­den
• 2603 W. 15th. [More than I want to spend on a sin­gle fam­ily, but I could afford it.]
• 2481 Thur­man Ave. [Might have some pos­si­bil­i­ties, but many houses on Thur­man are com­pletely bombed out, and this price for a 2-family makes me think it might be.].
• 2165 Colum­bus [I can’t decide if prox­im­ity to the VTR is a good or bad thing.]

I tried to nav­i­gate the Howard-Hanna Smythe-Cramer site, but it is com­pletely use­less in terms of search­ing. I polled my neigh­bors for rec­om­men­da­tions for a good real­tor and will also look in to the FSBO places. One of my neigh­bors also offered to help draw up the con­tract if I find a FSBO that suits me.

Sure I want to have my cake and eat it too, but mainly I want a good price on a solid house that isn’t going to require mas­sive amounts of reha­bil­i­tat­ing. The house that I looked at across the street from where I cur­rently live was on the mar­ket for $40k had no fur­nace or duct­work, exposed wiring and lath­ing and rot­ten sid­ing and ceil­ings. The guy who bought it prob­a­bly put that much if not more into it to make it liv­able again. That’s what I want to avoid.

I am now the proud owner of a tita­nium spork.

DO NOT MOCK ME!

Today is my 26th birth­day anniver­sary. Today I also gave my two weeks notice at my place of employ­ment. I finally have a new job after two years of look­ing! Actu­ally I had two new jobs. On Thurs­day I received two job offers within a few hours of each other. One in New York City work­ing as web­mas­ter in a news­room for a big finan­cial news site and one for a web/graphic design posi­tion redesign­ing county office web­sites at the Cuya­hoga County offices in down­town Cleveland.

It was a very tough deci­sion. I spent much of Fri­day dur­ing my drive to Notre Dame on the phone with folks in NYC and much of the rest of the week­end mak­ing cost of liv­ing cal­cu­la­tions and effort of move cal­cu­la­tions and lifestyle cal­cu­la­tions and talk­ing with my friends and fam­ily about the var­i­ous options. I’ve decided to stay in Cleve­land. By stay­ing here I’ll be able to save more money, look for a house and con­tinue to broaden my skills. And get a dog! The NYC job would have looked awe­some on a resume, would have been chal­leng­ing and pro­duc­tive, but the Cleve­land posi­tion con­stitues a lifestyle upgrade and the NYC would have been a lat­eral move in that regard. I’ll finally be able to stop liv­ing pay­check to pay­check and will be doing work that is in line with my passions.

I think I’m the only per­son who knows what a close thing it was. I’d already started look­ing for apart­ments in NYC and rekin­dling dor­mant friend­ships. My mind was focused on New York and I had given up com­pletely on the Cleve­land job mar­ket. Maybe the most dif­fi­cult part of my dis­cern­ing process this week­end was detun­ing that focus so I could be as objec­tive as pos­si­ble. I’m wor­ried that my friends in NYC will feel like my rejec­tion of that posi­tion will come across as a rejec­tion of them, and I don’t want that to hap­pen, because it isn’t. I’m going to build up my comp time and visit NYC some­time next year and take the folks who helped me out for dinner.

But in the end I am giddy and grin­ning that I finally have a job doing some­thing that is actu­ally inter­est­ing and can leave the grim con­fines, patron­iz­ing pay and cor­po­rate indif­fer­ence of my cur­rent posi­tion for a place that treats employ­ees like peo­ple instead of infi­nitely renew­able resources.

In cel­e­bra­tion of my new job, here is a song: I Work For the Gov­ern­ment Now by Cen­tral Ser­vices. Here is another link to the same song, since you only get 100 DLs from YSI. I promise to be worth the tax­payer money that will pay my salary.

Almost a year ago I made my first Google Map for the redesign of the TWiFi site. I didn’t touch the API again until I finally started redesign­ing Tremon­ter a few months back. The idea for cre­at­ing a neigh­bor­hood map for Tremont had been rat­tling around in my head since I first started the site, but I knew how tedious the work would be and so kept putting it off.

Now that the Tremont map is finally tak­ing shape, I must admit that the tedium is still present, but is cur­rently out­weighed by the fact that the map looks so cool. I’d bet­ter be care­ful though, or I’ll start putting Google Maps on everything.

I still need to fig­ure out the right javascript tweaks to make no mark­ers appear until their respec­tive boxes are checked in the leg­end, but oth­er­wise the only thing left to do is cob­ble together the addresses, phone num­bers, web­sites and coor­di­nates for sev­eral hun­dred busi­nesses in the few square miles that is Tremont, and plug the data into the xml file. Look­ing at it in that direc­tion seems a bit daunt­ing, so I’ll just take it one marker at a time.

It was almost death by vehic­u­lar homi­cide this morn­ing on the way to work. I was cut-off almost side-swiped by a bumper-sticker ribbon-magnet engulfed old-school Chevro­let Sub­ur­ban. Only my light­ning reflexes and good brakes saved me from being sar­dined into the median wall. Since I was only the dis­tance to the front of my car from the bumper of the offender I had a per­fect view to read some of the stick­ers which included [I kid not]:

• In case of Rap­ture this car will be unmanned.
– Based on the driver’s skill, for a brief moment I thought that the Rap­ture had actu­ally happened.

• God is my co-pilot.
– Yeah, sure. And Satan rides shot­gun with me. [which is actu­ally another bumper sticker]

• God Pro­vides.
– And if he doesn’t I’ll run you over in my Giant Truck™!

• Prac­tice Ran­dom Acts of Kind­ness and Sense­less Acts of Beauty.
– She had the Ran­dom and Sense­less down…

• Sup­port Our Troops.
– By dri­ving a 30-year old vehi­cle that could only pass an eCheck with divine intervention.

After she passed the semi, going about 2 mph faster than it [˜67mph], I man­aged to pass her. I didn’t flip her off though, that would have been unChristian.

Today is poem revi­sion day.

Cur­rently Revised:

•Start­ing easy: A title change, now Reveille.
•Tight­ened up Car­tog­ra­phy.
•Gram­mat­i­cal fixes and less active word­ing in Oubli­ette.
•Refor­mat­ted Crash and some­how fouled up the font size through­out my entire site? Stu­pid pre tag. Stu­pid autoad­just­ing text-size IE browser. What a waste of time.
• Sig­nif­i­cant revi­sions to The Valiant.

Done for the day. Time to work on the Tremont Inter­ac­tive Map.

I joined the iPod armada the other day. Ever since I heard about the impend­ing release of the 2nd gen­er­a­tion Shuf­fle, I’ve wanted one. The mp3 player has finally reached the exact size/memory/price point that I wanted, so I picked one up. At $80, for 1GB of stor­age capac­ity and an egre­giously long bat­tery life in a pack­age smaller than a match­book I am more than sat­is­fied. The ear­buds suck, but I’ll sur­vive, and likely even start run­ning again, which was the main rea­son apart from gear­head­ism for the purchase.

Wher­ever you go, there you are. Liam and pre­co­cious off­spring. Pan-seared duck breast Thai deliv­ery at 9pm at night. Upper West Side nice as always. Police locks on doors tell a ten year old dif­fer­ent story. All air­ports look the same; still get slightly nau­seous dur­ing descent. They shut off the air flow: hot and bumpy and noth­ing to look at. Came home to near white­out night snow. 49° apart­ment. Left­over pizza. Candy crust car this morn­ing and the first fake lady­bug: harbinger-vanguard-recon of annual invasion.

It is no sur­prise to me how badly air­lines are doing as an indus­try. I fly only infre­quently, but the new air­port secu­rity mea­sures since that fright in the UK a few months ago, the expense of tick­ets and the racket of sur­charges if you need to make a reser­va­tion change make me want to drive, no mat­ter how far I’m going. If I fly I’m sup­posed to get to the air­port 3 hours before my flight leaves, carry no more liq­uid than 3oz travel-sized con­tain­ers in a 1-quart zip-top bag that I have to dig out of my carry-on, along with my lap­top and what­ever else they want to look at. And of course there is the shoe-removal, coat-removal, etc. Then, if you make it past secu­rity quickly, you’re stuck for 2.5 hours twid­dling your thumbs. And if secu­rity is run­ning slow, you might stand in line for the 3 hours and miss your flight. There is not one redeem­ing qual­ity to the experience.

I’m fly­ing to NYC today. My plane leaves at 3:40, so I have to get to Hop­kins at 1. It doesn’t arrive in NYC until 7:02. A 6 hour trip time fly­ing, when I could drive to NYC in 8. Dri­ving wouldn’t cost me $500, I could have my car filled with nail clip­pers and bot­tles of water, and could pack my bag any way I chose. In ret­ro­spect I should have dri­ven. Less stress and has­sle on the open road.

It has been so long since I’ve not had a movie to review that I kind of for­get what other things I write about on here. I don’t think I’m going to weath­er­proof my apart­ment this year, because I seri­ously think it doesn’t do a bit of good. All of the drafts come from where the walls don’t square to the wood floors. I’ve been going to Civ con­sis­tently enough that they now know what I’m going to get based on the weather out­side. Large Mex­i­can Hot Choco­late and a toasted wheat bagel if it is cold. Some­thing from the fridge if it is warm. Even­tu­ally I sup­pose I’ll just be able to walk in and say “peanut but­ter!” or “cream cheese!” since that will be the only variable.

I’d been frus­trated try­ing to cap­ture par­tic­u­lar images from the films I’m watch­ing in The Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion list. DirectX tech­nol­ogy makes it hard to do a sim­ple screen cap­ture and paste into Pho­to­Shop. But some­one finally directed me to a way that works and doesn’t involve down­loaded spy-and-adware full pro­grams. And damn if it isn’t easy.

My lap­top runs Win­dows XP, so this should work for any com­puter run­ning that OS.

1. Open Dis­play Properties
2. Select the Set­tings Tab
3. Select the Advanced button
4. Select the Trou­bleshoot­ing Tab
5. Drag the Hard­ware Accel­er­a­tion bar to “none”
6. Select Apply

Now paus­ing a DVD in WMP or what­ever DVD pro­gram you use and doing a screen cap­ture [ALT-PrintScreen] should result in a still image that can be saved. Just remem­ber to turn hard­ware accel­er­a­tion back on after you’re done.

The night before last I met a rel­a­tively new Tremont res­i­dent for beer and tacos at the Lin­coln Park Pub. We spent nearly two hours chat­ting about the var­i­ous places we’d lived in Indi­ana, job prospects and how to fix Cleve­land. Yes­ter­day I was going to write more about this, but due to a power out­age, I had no inter­net access. They ended up send­ing us home from work at 11, after nearly three hours of sit­ting in the dark. So, I did what any red-blooded Amer­i­can man would do with an extra 4 hours of time in a day; I went shop­ping. I finally found a replace­ment hoodie, even though it is brown, not black, slightly dis­tressed and from a com­pany called Amer­i­can Rag. At least it doesn’t have a logo on it and I am now warm. It does have an inside breast pocket which will be per­fect for my cam­era when I’m out and about.

When I got back to Tremont, Rafiq needed a ride out to E.91st and St. Clair so I took him and a friend out there and spent a solid forty min­utes talk­ing poetry and the artis­tic process with the friend. I’ve for­got­ten his name because I’m a jerk. Friend is going to LA for a few months for some inten­sive writ­ing with a cre­ative part­ner in crime and from the few glimpses I had of the work he has done and has planned, he’s going to cre­ate some fierce stuff.

The weather yes­ter­day was the sort that only appears in the fall. Brisk and mostly cloudy, mostly nim­bus but ragged in shape and errant in move­ment that light from the sun kept leak­ing around them all and mak­ing the whole day into a fleet­ing golden hour.

I’ve got so much web-based work to do that I’m con­sid­er­ing drop­ping the $50/mo it would cost to have inter­net access at home again. The redesign of Tremon­ter is mov­ing fit­fully, I’m hav­ing to teach myself much mySQL, and Dru­pal’s doc­u­men­ta­tion assumes a cer­tain level of devel­oper exper­tise that I’m just now get­ting. The inter­ac­tive Google API–dri­ven neigh­bor­hood map I have plans for hasn’t even been glanced at. I run into too many peo­ple that I know at Civ­i­liza­tion to accom­plish much, and the Jef­fer­son Library dis­al­lows FTP access. I’ll prob­a­bly just ride on over to Talkies.

Actu­ally, it looks like Adel­phia has a $24/mo for 3/mos deal going on if you sign up online. Of course, there is a $35 acti­va­tion fee along with that and their online sign-up form is busted. So much for that deal.

Yes­ter­day I did some­thing I haven’t done in a very long time. After work I sat down and read for six and a half hours. I should have con­tin­ued search­ing for jobs [cur­rently look­ing in Toronto] or worked on the redesign for Tremon­ter or read some Neigh­bor­hood Con­nec­tions Grant Pro­pos­als or done some more hoof­work try­ing to find get a list of youth pro­gram­ming for the 2007 Cleve­land Lead­er­ship Sum­mit or even gone for a run or made din­ner or at least done the dishes or vac­u­umed. I cur­rently have no moti­va­tion. I’ve been work­ing so hard at so many dif­fer­ent things for so long and still haven’t got­ten any­where [or so it appears to me]. I’ve been look­ing for a new job for two years now and have had three and a half inter­views in that entire time. One of my cowork­ers, fresh out of col­lege, just got a new job mak­ing $6k more than I do.

There is obvi­ously some­thing wrong with how I search for jobs or my resume or my com­port­ment in the inter­view that wrecks me. I need to fig­ure out what that is, exactly, and fix it. Although being pol­ished and the right fit for the job doesn’t mean the job is going to be out there, in Cleve­land at least. I need to fig­ure out what I want to do with my life and do it. Cur­rently I’ve decided that when and if I ever get $4k saved I’ll just quit and move from Cleve­land. It is hard to save that much when I still make under $29k after nearly three years and one pro­mo­tion. Where will I go? I don’t know. What I’ll do when I get there? I don’t know. Wher­ever it is, it’ll have to have more oppor­tu­ni­ties for me than Cleve­land does, that’s for certain.

I love Tremont, I love the style of Cleve­land and its enter­tain­ment scene, I love the peo­ple. I’ll con­tinue to do the best I can for the city until the day I leave. But I’m out. That’s the only moti­va­tion I have today. Cleveland’s got every­thing I want in a city except for a good, chal­leng­ing and inter­est­ing job.

I had a full and excel­lent week­end, full of superla­tives. I had sushi at Pacific East because Kimo’s was closed for the Indian’s game, watched A Mur­der of Crows by Mac Well­man at The Lim­inis and had a Pisco Sour and Bour­bon Daisy at the VTR. A Mur­der of Crows [I’m prob­a­bly going to go see it again to make sure] may very well be my new favorite play. I didn’t really have an old favorite play, but this one fit right up my alley. I got a sweet ‘biner clip with built-in flash­light at the VTR too.

On Sat­ur­day I grilled some kebabs from the WSM and made the most deli­cious pork chop I’ve ever had. Yes, a few weeks ago I said the same thing, but this chop was bet­ter. Heir­loom toma­toes and roasted corn on the cob com­pleted the meal. I also put­tered around Mar­ket Square and the City Xpres­sionz [God I hate typ­ing like I’m l33t] spray-paintathon.

Sun­day I did my laun­dry and went to see Thee Sil­ver Mt. Zion and BLKTYGR at the Grog Shop. Rafeeq & Co. put on the best show I’d seen from them and Thee Sil­ver Mt. Zion made me think about the meld­ing of pol­i­tics and art. How all too often art is used in the ser­vice of pol­i­tics instead of the other way ’round. Thee Sil­ver does it the other way ’round and the music def­i­nitely ben­e­fits from it.

I should also men­tion that I made my first [and hope­fully last] visit to Crocker Park over the week­end. That place is the flag­ship of Amer­i­can deca­dence and moral bank­ruptcy. An enclosed sub­ur­ban “lifestyle cen­ter” [“mall” is too prole, appar­ently] designed to look urban, com­plete with res­i­den­tial lofts above the big boxes, speak­ers vom­it­ing top-40 muzak from the ‘80s hid­den behind the care­ful land­scap­ing and the whole place made my skin crawl. Seri­ously. Sub­ur­ban faux-urban loft apart­ments above a rich-person-only mall where you can buy a park­ing space so you don’t have to walk as far to the stores. I didn’t see one non-white per­son the entire time I was there. WASP city. The place made my skin fuck­ing crawl. More on Lit­tle Citadels.

I got my pass­port and my Notre Dame foot­ball tick­ets in the mail yes­ter­day. I’ll be going to the Penn State game with my uncle, the same one who took me to my first ND game [and Lou Holtz’s last] as my 16th birth­day present. Tick­ets for Michi­gan, Pur­due and UCLA also go to him, but I’ve got tick­ets for the Mono­gram game against Army to mark the tenth anniver­sary of my first ND game.

The pass­port turn­around was much faster than I thought. Some­thing like a month instead of 3 like I’d heard. Good thing too, because Amer­i­cans won’t be able to get back into the US from Canada with­out a pass­port start­ing Jan­u­ary 1, 2007.

Also received in the mail yes­ter­day: Finder.

My high school buddy Phil came in this week­end for a visit. We did a tiny music odyssey, went to a show at The Church, the Rock Hall, and the Happy Dog. Even though this wasn’t the best week­end to see a band [nobody par­tic­u­larly big was play­ing] we still rocked out to noise on Fri­day and blue­grass on Sat­ur­day. Prov­ing once again that no mat­ter what your musi­cal taste, there you’ll be able to find a place in Cleve­land play­ing it.

So it looks like I’m not going to be able to afford a house in Tremont. With only one excep­tion, every house that I researched [about 2 dozen] would sell for sig­nif­i­cantly more than what I can get a mort­gage on. There was one house on Auburn, pur­chased in 1997 for $13k, that was sold in 2004 for $134k. It appre­ci­ated 10× its orig­i­nal value in less than ten years. The cur­rent owner is prob­a­bly try­ing to flip it for another $20k or so. Many of the prop­er­ties that are for sale are owned by the same peo­ple. Two folks in par­tic­u­lar had 3 or 4 prop­er­ties on the mar­ket. Not that any of this mat­ters, I don’t want a house until I have a bet­ter source of income.

I went to my local 5/3 branch in Tremont yes­ter­day and sat down with a very nice woman who agreed to help me learn about house-buying pro­ce­dures and hoop-jumping, the var­i­ous pro­grams that 5/3 has avail­able and how much I could get a home loan for at my present salary. I learned about orig­i­na­tion fees [fees charged by lenders for pro­cess­ing the loan paper­work], clos­ing costs [appraisal, title work, county record­ing fees, credit check, etc] and pre-paids [inter­est, prop­erty taxes, homeowner’s insur­ance] which are all rolled-in to the mort­gage on top of the cost of the house. I learned that prop­erty taxes are paid in arrears and that all inter­est on loans is tax deductible. Since I only have a stu­dent loan I thought only that inter­est was tax deductible because I was a stu­dent. I learned about var­i­ous meth­ods of mort­gage pay­ment, includ­ing a biweekly half-payment sys­tem that results in an extra house-payment per year and can save up to $30k and 6 years of pay­ments on the life of a 30-year mort­gage. I learned that with most mort­gages you end up pay­ing almost twice the value of the home over the length of the mort­gage. I learned how apprais­ers come up with the value of a home. I learned that if you’re pur­chas­ing a home from a real­tor, it is wise to bring your own real­tor to the table to rep­re­sent your best inter­ests. As an indus­try cour­tesy real­tors will split the com­mis­sion on a home and since this com­mis­sion is paid by the seller, I would be get­ting some cash for my real­tor with­out pay­ing for it myself.

Then we did the number-crunching. I learned about Dinky­town, a site where you can cal­cu­late mort­gage pay­ments and just about any other type of finan­cial cal­cu­la­tion. Even at my pay-level, under $29k a year, I could get a loan from 5/3 with zero down and 100% financ­ing with no mort­gage insur­ance for $110k. This is cal­cu­lated from my gross yearly income. Cal­cu­lat­ing from my net income, I could get at $70k loan. The $70k loan makes much more sense to me than stretch­ing myself as thin as I would have to do for the $110k ver­sion. Good luck find­ing a house in Tremont for either of those prices. But then, I’m going to do my research on that as well. I rode my bike around the neigh­bor­hood today and made a list of the addresses of all the homes that are for sale. Then I can go to the Cuya­hoga County Auditor’s site and look up the trans­ac­tion infor­ma­tion for the addresses of the houses for sale. Once I get the par­cel num­ber, I can then go to the County Recorder’s site and see the actual mort­gage infor­ma­tion on the home. From this I can esti­mate how much they’ll be ask­ing for the house, and can deter­mine whether or not it’ll be worth my time to call them. Of course, it would be faster to just call up all the places, but I wouldn’t learn as much.

As it stands I don’t think I can afford a house right now any­way. But by the time I get a bet­ter job, I’ll be for­mi­da­bly informed.

I had a den­tist appoint­ment yes­ter­day and I’m still cavity-less. I did get a refer­ral to an oral sur­geon to get my wis­dom teeth removed, as they’re caus­ing some crowd­ing again. I’m run­ning on 5 hours of sleep since I was at the Lit last night lis­ten­ing to poets and eat­ing cig­a­rette smoke for a nearly equiv­a­lent amount of time. I finally paid Tim Her­ron for the frame on the por­trait he did of me last win­ter. I hauled it home and the next time I see my mom [some­time in Sep­tem­ber we’re going to meet here] I can give it to her. I cer­tainly don’t want a life­size por­trait of myself star­ing at me while sit on my ass.

I was work­ing on a poem but I real­ized I was forc­ing it so I stopped and wrote this instead.

I received a call last night from some folks in Bat­tle Creek, MI that wants to do a site much like Tremon­ter. I met these peo­ple when I was at Neigh­bor­Works in Nashville. This is the sec­ond time I’ve been con­tacted by folks that need some con­sul­ta­tion on how to build a use­ful com­mu­nity site with­out the heavy costs of going to a design firm. Artie at Shaker Square was the other con­tact. Since every bit of soft­ware that I use to run Tremon­ter is free [or will be once I move it from Mov­able­Type to Word­press] the only over­head is host­ing and reg­is­tra­tion. I had to run to taco night at the LPP, but they’ve got my con­tact info so I expect to hear from them again.

I won­der how I could turn this sort of thing [which is start­ing to become com­mon] into a consultation/simple design pay­ing gig. I don’t know if it is fea­si­ble, since my price-point would have to be rel­a­tively low and that would neces­si­tate sev­eral projects at once. I think at best it can be supplemental.

Lou posted some sweet pics from where I was on Sat­ur­day after­noon. You might even see one of me if you look closely. I’m also think­ing about putting a side­bar of posts back up.

So I’m mak­ing a bet­ter effort to buy more organic food­stuffs. I was pretty well set in my ways buy­ing from The Bas­ke­te­ria at the WSM but I’ve not been to the mar­ket in quite a while for no real rea­son. In any case, through the influ­ence of cer­tain var­i­ous peo­ple in my orbit, I have started shelling out the extra bread for bread with less extras. I’ve already deter­mined that buy­ing organic fruit juice is a bet­ter deal than the processed stuff. You have to cut it with water because it it so strong, so I’ll get a gal­lon of juice from a quart of the organic stuff. I also picked up organic milk, which I will make myself drink before it goes bad because it costs almost as much as a gal­lon of the pasteur-homogen-ized stuff. [My inher­ent cheap­ness never ceases to amaze me.] Organic eggs last just as long as reg­u­lar ones [or there­abouts] so I have no wor­ries there. Espe­cially since I got this awe­some brownie recipe that requires a whole half car­ton of ‘em.

I’m also try­ing to get per­mis­sion to use a local semi-privublicate com­post. If I can get per­mis­sion I’ll almost never have to empty my trash again. Plus, pet Drosophila melanogaster. [I love say­ing that].

One of the obvi­ous flag-raisers for “matu­rity” is an inter­est in things that only codgers find inter­est­ing. For me this is antique fur­ni­ture. Specif­i­cally antique oak fur­ni­ture. Even more specif­i­cally, antique mis­sion oak fur­ni­ture. Even more more specif­i­cal­li­est, refin­ish­ing antique mis­sion oak fur­ni­ture. Patience is a def­i­nite virtue in a search for a spe­cific piece of fur­ni­ture. I waited nearly a year before find­ing a din­ing room table that I liked [and at a great price]. It isn’t mis­sion style, but it has clean enough lines to sat­isfy me in that regard.

I still need to learn that when I do find some­thing that suits, I shouldn’t quail at dish­ing out the bread in order to take it home with me. My mom taught me about this when she bought me two chairs to go with the table that cost twice as much as the table itself [and still need to be refinished].

My cur­rent long­stand­ing search is for a library table to serve me as a desk/workspace. Some­thing almost exactly like this. The per­fect fit for me wouldn’t have the shelf at on the bot­tom [I like leg room] but oth­er­wise that table is just right. [Actu­ally, the apron might be a bit too low, but I can just get a lower seated chair.]

My newest search is for a cre­denza [as I’ve recently learned is how the kids are call­ing it these days] with cup­board or slid­ing doors and no draw­ers to use as an enter­tain­ment cen­ter. This piece is beau­ti­ful, but I don’t want one with draw­ers if I can help it. Also, I couldn’t afford that piece in a gril­lion years. But some­thing like that is what I need to work toward in my strange sense of antique-modern mise-en-scene. [If you con­sider my life a movie].

The tough­est part of antique shop­ping is wad­ing through the never-ending flow of ornately-hideous glass­ware and sundry other junk labelled as antique. It is amaz­ing how much crap lasts the years while beau­ti­ful stuff dies of neglect. I’ve yet to find more than one decent antique store in Cleve­land. The Lorain antique strip was unim­pres­sive to some­one who grew up in a place where there are more antique stores than bars. There is a huge antique mall near Day­ton that I want to visit some­time. Maybe this summer/fall.

I went to the Grove­wood Tav­ern last night to meet Chas Rich and final­ize the site design for his rein­car­nated Pitt sports weblog: Pitt Blather. George Nemeth showed up as well and hooked me up with the CDs I won at Blog­ga­palooza and in trade I finally got rid of gave him my lava lamp. I had BBQ Craw­fish and Pis­ta­chio Creme Brulee [per­haps the most deli­cious thing ever], but like a dum­b­ass, I deleted the pics from my thumb­drive as they were upload­ing to Flickr. I guess this proves that it can even be too early for me in the morning.

The Great Lakes Com­modore Perry IPA I had and the dim­ness of the Grove­wood was cer­tainly needed in yesterday’s heat. I spent the longest, hottest night of my life in bed until I melted through my mat­tress and on to the floor, flowed out into my liv­ing room and con­gealed on the couch. It was bloody awful.

If any­one wants a Smith-Corona elec­tric type­writer that is in like new con­di­tion, it is yours. –sold! [or whatever]

Same goes for a lava lamp with blue juice and white lava. –sold! [or whatever]

I’ve also got an 8x10 [or maybe a lit­tle larger] mir­ror with a white frame if you’d like it.

Let’s see what else…

I’ve got an elec­tric can­dle warmer that burns scented can­dles w/o a flame or fear of fire for free. [Still don’t know why I got that for Christmas]

For sale, I have a Kens­ing­ton lap­top dock­ing sta­tion that was used once. $129 price tag, yours for $50 or best offer.

I’ve also got [Nerd Alert!] 3200+ Magic the Gath­er­ing cards and some really nice ones too, all yours for $250.

…I am focused like a laser beam on noth­ing at all. This is a recipe for mad­ness. A hold­ing pat­tern, wait­ing to hear from sev­eral sources on sev­eral dif­fer­ent top­ics. My plate needs one less side dish. To con­tinue the metaphor, I feel like I am spin­ning plates on top of lit­tle dow­els, and the plates have deli­cious things to eat on them, but I can’t eat any of them because I have to keep the plates spin­ning. I just need three spe­cific phone calls, two pack­age deliv­er­ies and Sat­ur­day. Such is sum­mer. 6 months from now I’ll bemoan­ing the fact that all I have to do is watch Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion films.

I wanted to have a bowl of cereal this morn­ing. How­ever, the new bag resisted my ini­tial attempts to open it until it sud­denly burst and toasted oats cor­us­cated through my kitchen like underfoot-crunching manna from heaven. The bag split com­pletely in half so every bit went to waste. I should stick with peanut-buttered toast. My break-fast was simul­ta­ne­ously bro­ken and unbroken.

In the past two days I have received The New Com­plete Hoyle [Revised] which has already height­ened my geek­ery since it pro­vides his­tor­i­cal back­ground for the games it then tells you the rules of. I used to read ency­clo­pe­dias and dic­tio­nar­ies cover-to-cover when I was lit­tle, so read­ing a book of rules for games of skill and chance isn’t too far off the hook. And yes­ter­day I didn’t get my foot­ball tick­ets, but got the refund for them and a list of the games I did get tick­ets to. If it weren’t for pay­ing my mono­gram dues [with unclu­lar assis­tance] I prob­a­bly wouldn’t have got­ten any tick­ets. I got 2 tick­ets to Penn State, 2 tick­ets to Michi­gan, 2 tick­ets to Pur­due, 2 tick­ets to UCLA and 2 tick­ets to Army. I also got a check for $660 for all the tick­ets I didn’t get. Not a bad lot­tery when you get your money back.

I also rode my bike to Kimo’s in Ohio City again last night for sushi. It has to be the best sushi in town and with the best prices, just under $1 for each piece of hoso maki. I had Unagi, Dyna­mite and one I can’t remem­ber that was Japan­ese may­on­aise and crab. Unagi remains my favorite. I love eel. Must be the Welsh her­itage bub­bling up.

I was asked a good ques­tion yes­ter­day. How well do you deal with ambi­gu­ity? Which prob­a­bly only seems like an ambigu­ous ques­tion to some­one like me. It is clever in its self-reference. I think I answered well enough, and even moreso if the ques­tioner real­ized that I applied my way of deal­ing with ambi­gu­ity in for­mu­lat­ing the answer.

I ran in to Jeff Schuler while he was car­ry­ing his blown-tire bike down Abbey from the RTA sta­tion and offered to give him a ride to his apart­ment. He accepted and as we fin­ished load­ing his bike into my back seat a cop pulled up and started has­sling us for “block­ing a lane of traf­fic” which he him­self was doing. We were on W. 20th, which isn’t exactly the busiest street in Cleve­land and he told us we should have turned on to Abbey, which is about 400% busier, and park there. I said “I’m just help­ing my friend load his busted bike into the car.” and “We’re leav­ing now.” so he just looked at me sourly and drove off. I wanted to tell him to go arrest the crack dealer by Lin­coln Park instead of has­sling a guy in cuff links and a beater car help­ing out a friend, but that wouldn’t have been very constructive.

Yes­ter­day was bee-like in busi­ness; I needed a beer. Since the weblog­ger meetup was at the Town Fryer I decided to head on down there for some fried cat­fish and deli­cious green beans and fried oreos. I con­vinced Jeff to come with me and he fixed his bike in an instant and I busted out the Mon­goose and we headed on down. I got home around 9:30 and was com­pletely spent.

I had a long week­end in Kingston, Ontario. It is a beau­ti­ful town with awe­some archi­tec­ture and widely-available Orange Crush. Their annual busker fes­ti­val was also this week­end, so the streets were full of street per­form­ers, play­ing instru­ments, telling sto­ries, doing magic acts and acro­bat­ics. I had pou­tine, sushi, and cor­nish game hen. On the way back to Cleve­land, I ended up in the scari­est place I’ve ever seen; Le Ray, NY. The entire town of Le Ray con­sists of a Super Wal-Mart, a McDonald’s, and around 500 sub­di­vi­sional clone-houses. Every­body was dri­ving an SUV. I got the hell our of there as fast as pos­si­ble. I thought I’d fallen into the Twi­light Zone. I much rather pre­fer places with character.

I hate this bloody weather we’ve been hav­ing. Every day when I get home from work it starts rain­ing and then stops rain­ing but remains over­cast and threat­en­ing so all there is to do is sweat in the clammy dark­ness of early sum­mer Cleve­land after­noons. I’d be fine with sweat­ing to death if it was also hot and sunny, but this 75°F, 80% humid­ity over­cast crap caused by the Great Lakes evap­o­rat­ing caused by global warm­ing caused by the crap spew­ing out of my car and every­one else’s and the steel mill and every­one else’s and every­one else’s every­one else, is start­ing to make me just a lit­tle tiny bit grouchy.

This exer­cise in water­shed aware­ness is very inter­est­ing. How well do you know your ecosystem?

I’m the NEO webgeek pro­filed over at BFD today. Thanks go to Wendy Hoke for ask­ing the ques­tions and George Nemeth for pro­vid­ing the space.

In other news I’ve been slowly but steadily refur­bish­ing my 8-bit NES, its con­trollers, and now the games. Those things are filthy. Iso­propyl alco­hol wasn’t doing the job so I pur­chased a spe­cial pasty sub­stance clean­ing kit. Now it just takes for­ever. But no more blink­ing red light! Peo­ple inter­ested in play­ing Bub­ble Bob­ble or Excite­bike or get­ting their asses handed to them at Ice Hockey are wel­come to visit.

I was plan­ning on a nice quiet night at home until Steve dragged me kick­ing and scream­ing to the Lit so I could make some changes to the TwiFi site design before he goes down to Colum­bus next week to present on it. While I did this Andy showed some geek porn on the bar closed-circuit tele­vi­sion. We watched a 1992 instruc­tional video on a 15 ppm printer and a sales video for file servers. Nick and Ball­room John­son were also there, so there was talk over hand-drawn elec­tri­cal dia­grams and Argen­tin­ian polka. I also got the basics put together for a site that my buddy Jeremy requested for his brother, who was recently diag­nosed with sar­coma and has an even chance of mak­ing it another year.

Since it has been awhile here are some cool links:

• MetaFil­ter Music- music cre­ated by site users. Really great so far, and brand new. [My favorites thus­far].
• Upon First Meet­ing- RISD pho­tog­ra­phy student’s gallery of por­traits of peo­ple from Craigslist.
• Vic­tor Borge Pho­netic Punc­tu­a­tion, Vic­tor Borge with mup­pets [flash vid]
• Kit­ten Can­non
• The Col­lier Sys­tem for the Clas­si­fi­ca­tion of Very Small Objects
• The Aural Times- Josh Mil­lard com­poses songs about the news.

Get­ting to my apart­ment has been even hairier than usual lately. Both entrance streets are one way, but the one that is most acces­si­ble to me is on-again/off-again closed by a con­struc­tion com­pany that is build­ing 5 $200k tax-abated town­houses on about 2000 ft² of land. Each town­house is, lit­er­ally, ten feet wide. Would you pay that kind of money for a house ten feet wide? They are going to be three sto­ries, with rooftop porches that have a delight­ful down­wind view of the steel mill and of the rot­ting rooftops of the houses next door to them. The last time I saw the plans, they were also going to have one wall angling out over the street, and one side of the build­ing cov­ered in cor­ru­ga­tion. That’ll look really pretty after a few years of sul­fur diox­ide in the rain. I really can’t see these things sell­ing, but they prob­a­bly will. I don’t know much about that.

I’m just bitch­ing because my ride home takes an extra three minutes.

I got up early this morn­ing and rode my bike from Tremont to the Mem­phis Drive-in for the flea mar­ket. I killed about an hour and a half brows­ing through all the booths, eat­ing some soft-serve and shoot­ing the breeze. I ended up buy­ing Dr. Mario and Pro Wrestling for my NES for $5. Then I went from Brook­lyn to Detroit-Shoreway and the 84 Char­ing Cross Book­store. This is a book collector’s book­store and they have some absolutely amaz­ing stuff, includ­ing some edi­tions of Edgar Rice Bur­roughs adven­tures with great cover art. They’ve got a huge selec­tion of poetry, first edi­tions of many books and lots of signed works as well. I ended up get­ting a fenc­ing man­ual from the turn of the cen­tury [the 20th cen­tury]. They’re only open on Thurs­days, Fri­days and Sat­ur­days, or by appoint­ment, but if you love books, you should make the effort to visit. They also have a bea­gle with really soft ears.

I rode on home and put some nice thick pork chops in a mari­nade and then went to do my laun­dry where I chat­ted with a cool girl and her Papil­lon. Then I grilled my pork chops on the char­coal grill I picked up last week and they were sim­ply deli­cious. I think pork chops are prob­a­bly always best grilled. Now I’m at Tremont Scoops, where I just pol­ished off a pint of Choco­late Peanut But­ter Cup ice cream. I’m sit­ting out­side, using their WiFi and watch­ing loaded sub­ur­ban­ites pack them­selves into Lolly the Trol­ley for this weekend’s Tremont House Tour. I think I’m gonna go home and play some Dr. Mario now.

If I’m ever going to get out of this rut and in a sit­u­a­tion where I can do some­thing that means some­thing I’m going to need a stronger skill set. I think I’ve fig­ured out why no one wants to hire me. I obvi­ously don’t have enough expe­ri­ence or strong enough skills for the type of posi­tions I’ve been seek­ing. Even though Hein­lein said “spe­cial­iza­tion is for insects” and I’ve been of that par­tic­u­lar mind­set since before I knew who Hein­lein was, it looks like I have to bug out. My cur­rent posi­tion is not doing any­thing to enhance my employ­able skills, so I think I’m going to have to up anchor and go explor­ing. Just as soon as I save up a cou­ple thou­sand more.

Lately I have this feel­ing that I liken to being inside an egg. I am inside this egg and what I do with my life paints the inside of the shell and every­where I look things aren’t so bad, since I’ve col­ored every bit of space in the shell. Yet there is a feel­ing deep in my lizard hind­brain that this shell is so much less than I think it is; a sus­pi­cion that it is noth­ing more than a shell and that if I broke it my world would open wide. But I’m not strong enough or focused enough to break it at the right spot.

I bought a grill yes­ter­day and grilled some sweet corn and burg­ers and made Steve come over and eat some of it. It is an 18.5″ char­coal grill, one of the cheapo deals and even on sale. Nev­er­the­less, the box said the grill was “deluxe.” Which makes me won­der just how crummy a non-deluxe grill must be. It got the job done though, and will work very well as long as I main­tain it. Ground sir­loin was on sale, so the burg­ers were bet­ter for it. I put Worces­ter­shire sauce in two of them and an impromptu spice com­bi­na­tion in the other two. Some smoked Gouda on top, with let­tuce and tomato, and those were some kind of deli­cious. The Red Stripe was par­tic­u­larly nice on such a hot day.

Now that I’ve got a grill, I should throw a party.

My newest film infat­u­a­tion is For­bid­den Zone, a cre­ation by The Mys­tic Knights of the Oingo Boingo and fea­tur­ing a great sound­track enhanced by Danny Elfman.

True to my ever-eclectic film taste, this cult mas­ter­piece com­bines my favorite Ger­man Expres­sion­ism, old style Bosco car­toon­ish­ness, extra-dimensions, midgets [Herve Vil­lechaize!], frog but­lers, hot top­less women, and bondage into a strange con­fec­tion of joy [to me at least]. This is def­i­nitely some­thing you should see at some point in your life. Many thanks go to Ball­room John­son and Andy at The Lit for intro­duc­ing me to this film. I now own it on DVD, though it took 6 weeks to get it. Here is another take on it and the offi­cial site [images]. Thanks to YouTube, you can see some clips:

• Squeezit the Moocher [Danny Elf­man as Satan!]
• Bim Bam Boom
• Pico and Sepul­veda
• Learn Your ABCs
• Witch’s Egg [Susan Tyrell!]

My con­tract with Ver­i­zon Wire­less is almost up, and since I’ve had con­sis­tently bad expe­ri­ences with them when I got my con­tract two years ago I switched to T-Mobile. Not only did Ver­i­zon not send me the rebate for my phone, they fudged up my num­ber trans­fer and had ridicu­lously crappy cus­tomer ser­vice. Oh yeah, they also turned over my call records to the NSA, which was in direct vio­la­tion of my con­tract. T-Mobile hooked me up with a new phone, and more min­utes at the same price that Ver­i­zon was charg­ing and refused the NSA’s demand. Acti­va­tion was a cinch, and I even got a prompt email response from an actual human to a sug­ges­tion I had. Go T-Mobile, even if you need shorter con­tracts and a plan with low any­time min­utes but unlim­ited nights and week­ends. [Yeah right, no one has that.]

Oh yeah, if you get a new cell phone remem­ber to recy­cle the old one. If you live in Cleve­land there are three dif­fer­ent places I found that will take your old phone:

1. League of Women Vot­ers
2. Cleve­land Metroparks Zoo
3. Cleve­land Museum of Nat­ural History

The League of Women Vot­ers will be get­ting mine.

I have always been bet­ter at tac­tics than strat­egy and I’m not try­ing a new tac­tic at poem writ­ing. Instead of putting it down fast­like, I’m work­ing on it micro-sized for the mini-times a milli-muse comes stalk­ing. Writ­ing by attrition.

•The Cleve­land Plan­ning Com­mis­sion has this awe­some inter­ac­tive map that I was shown last evening while plan­ning the 2007 Cleve­land Lead­er­ship Sum­mit. If you like play­ing with sta­tis­tics, or try­ing to get an overview of basic city sit­u­a­tions, this is the site for you.
• Here is a 2004 pdf from Juve­nile Court with data on juvy crime based on Sta­tis­ti­cal Plan­ning Area. Some inter­est­ing cor­re­la­tions can be found com­par­ing this data to the map.
• If you are famil­iar with any resources and pro­grams for youth and you live in the City of Cleve­land, please give me that infor­ma­tion, includ­ing Ward # and con­tact infor­ma­tion if possible.

This is an essen­tial part of our youth need assess­ment which, cou­pled with an in-school sur­vey, will be pre­sented to Mayor Jack­son with a request that city employ­ees be allowed flex time each month to do vol­un­teer work with Cleve­land youth, in the types of pro­grams that Cleve­land youth want to par­tic­i­pate in. Our angle is that the city might not have money to use for our kids, but it cer­tainly has the manpower.

I’m respon­si­ble for gath­er­ing data on pro­grams in Ward 13, but I’m also going to call up Neigh­bor­hood Con­nec­tions to see if they can pro­vide me with some data on youth-oriented pro­grams affil­i­ated with them. Adam, remem­ber to call:

• Coun­cil­man Cim­per­man
• Mer­rick House
• TWDC
• Churches

and follow-up on what­ever leads you get, instead of sit­ting on your duff drink­ing hard liquor.

I don’t like vague direc­tions when I’m try­ing out a new recipe. Not vague like Patrick’s black beans, but vague like this: I made mango sor­bet this week­end and the recipe called for reduced sugar water, but the direc­tions sim­ply said bring to a boil then reduce heat and sim­mer for five min­utes. .5C of sugar in 1.25C water. Then you mix it in with some man­gos and orange juice and freeze it [adding whipped egg-white later]. Mine ended up like mango ice or a mango slurpee instead of sor­bet because there was [obvi­ously] too much water in it. In ret­ro­spect, I have deter­mined that the sugar/water was sup­posed to be reduced until it was sim­ple syrup, but I guess the recipe just assumed I’d know that. Which brings me to my conclusion:

I’d like a Stu­pid Chef’s Illus­trated Ency­clo­pe­dia that gives you both meth­ods and pic­tures of cer­tain culi­nary tasks. Like what “stiff peaks” means when whip­ping egg whites, and how to sep­a­rate an egg in the first place [which my mom told me how to do when I asked] and lots of other things that cook­books assume a chef already knows. The Bet­ter Homes and Gar­dens cook­book is good for some of this, but it isn’t com­pre­hen­sive and is more focused on pro­vid­ing recipes than techniques.

So I sold a bunch of NES, SNES games and my PS1 to the Record Exchange yes­ter­day and found the Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion edi­tion of Monty Python’s Life of Brian in-store. Since they really only want to give you a store credit any­way, I ended up buy­ing it. They had a lot more Cri­te­rion films there, but I’m pretty much pos­i­tive it is cheaper to buy every­thing on eBay instead.

I need to start exer­cis­ing again. The marathon was aborted because of my knees and a lack of moti­va­tion, cou­pled with the fact that I was in Nashville any­way. Run­ning and pushups and situps should com­mence now that the weather is nice again. If I can run 5 days a week in the mid­dle of win­ter I should be able to do the same when the weather is nice. Still can’t afford to start fenc­ing again, though.

My first work­shop was focused on build­ing last­ing and effec­tive rela­tion­ships between adults and youth in neigh­bor­hoods. To our ben­e­fit, there was a 17 year old girl in our work­shop whose insights vastly improved the qual­ity of the work­shops. I was look­ing for infor­ma­tion on how to get youth in my ‘hood involved and keep them involved in improv­ing the neigh­bor­hood. Here are some bul­lets from my notes:

• Ask what youth have to offer to spark engage­ment. If they know their input is valu­able to you, they will be more inter­ested.
• Offer plenty of pos­i­tive rein­force­ment and trust.
• Pro­vide safe but relaxed envi­ron­ments for youth to feel com­fort­able in.
• Be trans­par­ent about your own expe­ri­ences. Say­ing “I was a teenager once” but not explain­ing the spe­cific instances that brought that remark out is essen­tially lying, and youth can pick that up.
• The prob­lems that face youth seem to be both sys­temic and pan­demic. That is, they receive lit­tle to no sup­port from gov­ern­ment insti­tu­tions and that the need for good lead­er­ship, pos­i­tive role mod­els, and qual­ity pro­grams to com­bat neg­a­tive influ­ences are found nation­wide.
• When plan­ning a youth pro­gram make sure to include youth in the der­mi­na­tion of the process and the future of the pro­gram. I think that any­thing you expect youth to be involved in should look for youth involve­ment from square one of plan­ning on.

• Look at the Louisville Office of Youth Devel­op­ment. They pro­vide a book­let list­ing nearly all of the youth-oriented pro­grams in the Louisville area free of charge. Sure wish Cleve­land had some­thing like this.

The Neigh­bor­Works Peak Per­for­mance Open­ing Ple­nary just fin­ished and I’m chow­ing on a bagged lunch. The open­ing remarks were pretty stan­dard, and there were the inevitably long people-we’d-like-to-recognize ses­sions, but now that it is over I’m ready to go on my first work­shop, Adults and Youth Work­ing Together.

When gas sticks above $3/gal, I’m going to unveil my great­est inven­tion. A milk-powered engine. Invest in dairy cows and breast pumps!

When I used to get sick and mom would take off a bit of work to care for me, I wouldn’t have much of an appetite. Often, I’d request ice cream, and, not get­ting it, would be told that I’m obvi­ously not that sick if I want to eat ice cream. A com­pro­mise was usu­ally reached with straw­berry gelatin, which I only want when I’m sick.

Mother’s day this year was kind of a bust. I went home, but halfway through Sat­ur­day mom came down with a fever so we left the auc­tion we were at and I hauled her home and attempted to care for her. Now I know where my crotch­ety nature when I’m ill comes from. I finally con­vinced her to get in bed and later in the evening she wanted some­thing to eat. What did she want to eat? Ice Cream. I gave her some.

I had a long week­end, trav­el­ling to and from Indi­ana for my cousin Jessica’s wed­ding. The wed­ding went off with­out a hitch, and Jes­sica was the least stressed and hap­pi­est bride I’ve ever seen at a wed­ding. I had to be down for the rehearsal, since I was read­ing peti­tions, and I left work early on Fri­day to make it there on time. No sooner do I get south of 271, then a dump­ster over­turns ten cars in front of me and I have to sit on my ass for an hour. The dri­ver wasn’t hurt. I still made it on time and went to the rehearsal din­ner as well, where I had Chicken Parmi­giana, Grilled salmon sundry veg­eta­bles and a potent rasp­berry sor­bet for dessert.

The day of the wed­ding was long and busy, with me assist­ing the mother-of-the-bride with var­i­ous last minute errands, but it ended with all the vodka I could drink and a Cohiba, so I’m not com­plain­ing. The recep­tion was a blast, and the prime rib we had there was delicious.

I got up early the day after the wed­ding, hangover-less thanks to my body’s tal­ent at pro­cess­ing Russ­ian agua, and helped my aunt pre­pare for the post-wedding brunch. Right after every­thing was finally ready, I ate a bunch of brunch food [includ­ing sugar cream cake, for which my aunt refuses to give me the recipe] and then hit the road.

I made it back to Cleve­land at about 4:30 and sent out my foot­ball ticket appli­ca­tions and got ready to do my laun­dry. I was greeted by my con­fed­er­ate flag-waving neigh­bor, drunk off his ass and stum­bling down my street and smok­ing up with his sim­i­larly drunk off his ass friend. They called me a fag­got, although they also live on Fruit Avenue. I should expect such para­doxes from my red­necked brethren by this point, espe­cially after liv­ing in Con­nersville for 18 years.

I’m cur­rently in the back­woods of Indi­ana. [Noblesville to be pre­cise. Hamil­ton county is one of the rich­est and fastest grow­ing coun­ties in the nation, but it still feel like back­woods because] My aunt and uncle still depend on AOL dial-up for inter­net access, but I’m cur­rently steal­ing WiFi from one of the $400k clone­houses that are creep­ing ever-closer to this turn of the cen­tury farm house. I’m con­sis­tently happy that I spent the extra bills for a more pow­er­ful receiver. My cousin is get­ting mar­ried later today, and there is an open bar at the reception.

CAVEAT: This post con­tains egre­gious amounts of cursing.

• When merg­ing and you are in the yield lane, yield you moth­er­fucker. And for chris­sakes speed the fuck up on an on-ramp. You should be going at least 60 by the time you reach the merge area on the interstate.

• When on the inter­state and approach­ing a merge, move one lane to the left, if pos­si­ble. This means that nei­ther you nor the dumb moth­er­fucker who wouldn’t know how to yield if his arms and legs were cut off by Gra­ham Chap­man have to slow down.

• If your car won’t go over 50mph, get the moth­er­fuck off my inter­state or I will beat you like a rented mule.

• If you are in the fast lane and a faster car comes up behind you, get the fuck over before they have to put on the brakes.

• If you can’t get the fuck over because there is an even slower moth­er­fucker in the lane next to you, speed the fuck up so the moth­er­fucker behind you doesn’t have to apply the brakes, and then get the fuck over as soon as possible.

• No mat­ter how fast you’re fuck­ing going, stay in the far­thest right lane that you can, because there will be a faster moth­er­fucker com­ing up behind you and you can avoid lots of has­sle by stay­ing in the slower lane where you belong.

• If you’re try­ing to be a moth­er­fuck­ing badass and merge your Haibatsu Grav­ity Well from the fast lane to an exit lane in less than a quar­ter of a mile with­out using your turn sig­nal, don’t get all pissy when I don’t let your sorry ass cut me off. I will fuck you up, motherfucker.

• If some­one uses their god­damn turn sig­nal, let them the fuck in your lane, unless you’re in a traf­fic jam and they are one of those igno­rant fuck­sticks who think they can drive all the way up to the exact spot where their lane ends and stick their dicks in your lane. Cas­trate those dumbfucks.

• When exit­ing, don’t slow down until you’re on the fuck­ing exit ramp. That’s what they’re fuck­ing for.

Man, I haven’t gone on a rant in for­ever. That felt good. Yes, I know the title is redundant.

Well if I hadn’t been con­vinced before, this month’s attempts at writ­ing a poem a day should have con­vinced me that my writ­ing process can­not be dis­ci­plined and effec­tive. I write when the spirit moves me, when Papa Legba uses me as his horse and what not. So I’m bail­ing on National Poetry month a bit early and I think I might attempt to write some tur­boshort fic­tion instead. Some­thing that even ADD can’t fight.

I spent the entire week­end clean­ing my apart­ment. It wouldn’t pass a mil­i­tary inspec­tion, but it is much cleaner than it was even when I moved in. Clean­ing the win­dows was the worst part since they were sealed with caulk at the begin­ning of win­ter and I had to pick it all off. My hands are dry and cov­ered in tiny cuts. And it con­tin­ues today at work as I have to rearrange my new cube into a con­ducive work envi­ron­ment. I man­aged to get rid of a book­case which cre­ates an illu­sion of space if not the reality.

hey buddy, what’s up
with your loco
motive? you think
you can touch her
and make her want
you? you think
because you’re big­ger
and stronger and
creepier she should
give it up to you?
or you’ll what?
tie her to the tracks?
twirl your mus­tache?
I’ve got news for you.
you’re the one roped
down.
and i’m the freight train.

I hate hear­ing about women who’ve been sex­u­ally what­ev­ered by dudes. Makes me furi­ous. I’m a pretty calm guy too.

• Appar­ently they’re called gin­ger­bread per­sons now.
• Pretty girls in Tremont run early in the morn­ing, not in the after­noon like I do.
• Lit­tle boys named Mateo will mag­i­cally appear every time you’re at the library and annoy the ever-living shit out of you while you apply for jobs.
• I love giv­ing peo­ple direc­tions to places in Tremont.
• I can get inter­mit­tant WiFi from Jewel Heart while sit­ting in my car at the laun­dro­mat.
• The squir­rels are going through their first molt of the year.

my slum­ber­ing tides
shall not coa­lesce into
the tramp­ing of
office build­ings
can­not not coerce me
into stuff­ing mean­ing
into words like too tight
cloth­ing or coin­cide
with the tem­per
of my week­end. There

is no coor­di­na­tion between
my foot and mouth,
though fol­low­ing them
often brings me to the
same place. I will no
longer couch my
thoughts in coy
syl­lo­gisms and logic
or be con­found your
emo­tions.
         I will
         sit on
         the grass
         and listen.

I wrote this a real long time ago and don’t remem­ber what I wanted to fix. I think I was just try­ing to be obtuse in order to appear like I had some­thing to say.

rail
spli
tter
tall
like
pine
thin
like
reed
lick
 any
 man
that
will
 wet
 his

horns.
you’ll
talk’em
down
first
if you
can or
if you
cain’t
you’ll
put
fire on
the
moun­tain
and in
our
bel­lies
teach
us to
speak
lead
lead us
to
speak
of your
speak­ing
as of
prophets
and
martyrs

you
were
all
of us
and
so we
pay
homage
at
your
monu
ment.

leader.

grim
vis­aged
American.

Well National Poetry Month is here and I’m going to write a poem each day Mon­day through Fri­day until it is over, much like last year. Today, since I watched a movie about Lin­coln last night, my attempted poem is about Lincoln.

National Poetry Month doesn’t start for another week, but I’m already psy­ched. I don’t think I’m going to have a haiku or poetry con­test this year, since entries have tailed off sig­nif­i­cantly since I was in col­lege, but I will once again do my poem-a-day thing that I started last year. I feel like I’ve been bork­ing things up for the past month or so but hope­fully I’m emerg­ing from that galac­tic weird­ness with new focus. Hope­fully this will result in bet­ter poetry than I’m used to writing.

My apart­ment cur­rently looks like what most peo­ple expect a bachelor’s apart­ment to look like. It is in post-sickness dis­as­ter recov­ery mode right now. That means that I’ve picked up all of the sop­ping hand­ker­chiefs and thrown away all the snotty tis­sue. I’ve yet to wash all of the sticky with dried orange juice dishes or throw out the toast rinds and coag­u­lated chicken noo­dle soup. Clothes, blan­kets, socks are strewn about, a pic­ture is awry because I bumped into it, and for some unknown rea­son, there is a pil­low in the mid­dle of the kitchen floor. I guess I know what I’m doing this week­end. That’s right. Cough­ing up phlegm that is so dense it sinks.

that is, if dele­ri­ous rav­ings all night and a vio­lent chest cough is mad cow.

I don’t write here because I think that my life and thoughts are impor­tant, but some­times I won­der if I write here to make myself think that my life and thoughts are impor­tant. It is a small change. They are remov­ing the ceil­ing tiles and doing elec­tri­cal work in the office, the result is a sig­nif­i­cant amount of chemically-treated fiber­board dust and mild wheez­ing for me. I hate things that make me wheeze. Last night, for what­ever strange rea­son, my apart­ment smelled like wet cig­a­rette ashes. Few things smell worse. I saw a woman walk­ing a bea­gle named Rosie and it tried to bite a man. My cousin is get­ting mar­ried in a month. I dreamed that I had a huge booger that I couldn’t pick. I ate pigs-in-a-blanket. I’ve been wear­ing the same pair of jeans for 5 days and they don’t smell yet. I need a hug. I need to buy new t-shirts, but they have to be the right kind and they are hard to find.

Only one thing that I wrote today strikes me as impor­tant. Can you guess what it is? That’s right, the booger dream.

I haven’t done one of these in a while. Ask me any ques­tion about any topic and I will intre­pidly endeavor to answer it.

The gas com­pany only comes around every six months or so to check my meter read­ing. The rest of the time they over­es­ti­mate my usage and charge me about $200 a month in gas for liv­ing in a one bed­room apart­ment. We’re encour­aged to do the gas man’s work for him by read­ing and sub­mit­ting our own read­ings, but this is nearly impos­si­ble. Oh sure, they say you can enter it online or over the phone but when you actu­ally try this you’re either told that your entry is invalid or an error appears. Try­ing to fig­ure out why this is hap­pen­ing is nearly impossible.

Read­ing a gas meter is not dif­fi­cult. My meter read­ing is def­i­nitely less than the esti­mate. I’ve been keep­ing my ther­mo­stat set at 60° this win­ter, and 55° while I’m not at home. The only thing I can fig­ure out is that they won’t accept read­ings that are lower than the esti­mate unless it comes from the actual gas man. Who doesn’t exist.

Run­ning the Domin­ion gas gaunt­let of auto­mated phone menus is the worst expe­ri­ence of its kind that I’ve ever had. There is no quick way to jump to a cus­tomer ser­vice rep­re­sen­ta­tive. You can’t sim­ply hit zero to be directed there, and they don’t tell you how to get there in the auto­mated menu. I lucked into it by pound­ing the 9 key about 20 times. Their hours are 7am to 7pm M-F, but only on Mars. Many places, after being on hold for 5 or 10 min­utes, offer to take your num­ber and call you back when your place in the queue is reached. I hung up and called again, fig­ur­ing that if I pre­tended I was going to can­cel my ser­vice that I’d get to a rep­re­sen­ta­tive faster. Turns out Domin­ion does have that leave your num­ber thing, but I was only prompted for it after I’d plugged all the “Can­cel this Account” but­tons. Now I have to wait between 1:03 and 1:17 to get a call­back. Pound­ing the 9 key about 20 times prob­a­bly just sent me per­ma­nently to the bot­tom of the queue. Touch-tone Hell. Those goug­ing incom­pe­tents at Dominion…

I’ve been on hold for over thirty min­utes at this point, lis­ten­ing to some broad spell out URLs and writhing in agony at a repeated smooth jazz ren­di­tion of While My Gui­tar Gen­tly Weeps.

This ver­sion is much cooler, mainly because of Prince.

Today is a good day. It only took me two and a half years, but I’ve finally man­aged to pay off the credit card debt I racked up while work­ing for peanuts on Into the Fire, mov­ing to Cleve­land, and wreck­ing my car. Now I can start pay­ing back my mom what I owe her and pour­ing more into my stu­dent debt payments.

heart­beat

hear
 eart
h
     beat
     be
he r
 ear
  art
     bea
   r    t
he
hea t

I don’t think I woke up because of the silence. And in any case it wasn’t as com­pletely silent as I led myself to believe. Ini­tially, I thought that I was wheez­ing; some­thing that only hap­pens when I’m sleep­ing in a place that has cats. I took a deep breath to test this out, but I was breath­ing easy. Then I real­ized that the sound I was hear­ing was my heart­beat. Not just the “What does a heart­beat sound like, Timmy?” sound that Timmy would make if some­one asked Timmy what a heart­beat sounded like, but some­thing almost preter­nat­u­rally keen. I could hear and feel my blood being pushed into my ven­tri­cles and flow­ing into and outof my veins and arter­ies. A heart­beat sounds noth­ing like what Timmy thinks it sounds like. You don’t hear pauses between the beats, it is almost like lis­ten­ing to the tides of the sea.

So now I’ve tried an attempt at con­crete poetry and another thing.

I’m try­ing to come up with effec­tive ways to get this place at which I inter­viewed last week to hire me. I woke up Sun­day morn­ing with the idea to make a Flash infomer­cial show­cas­ing my tal­ents. It was only the third time I’d used Flash, and hope­fully the end result didn’t look too Pow­er­Pointy. I think this was a good idea because not only does it illus­trate my cre­ativ­ity and eager­ness to work for the afore­men­tioned yet cur­rently remain­ing anony­mous place of busi­ness, but it was also a way for me to show my humor and refresh the applic­a­bil­ity of my inter­ests in the mem­ory of my interviewer.

I am cur­rently plot­ting other sin­is­ter ways in which I can infil­trate. These may or may not include:

• Using Mourn­ful Puppy Eyes.
• Unabashed Beg­ging.
• A Singing Telegram.
• Almost anony­mous dona­tions of large quan­ti­ties of unmarked, non-sequential $20s.
• Hunger Strike Until Hired.
• Bring­ing the office cocaine-laced fudge, get­ting every­one addicted and becom­ing the pup­pet mas­ter of the whole orga­ni­za­tion.
• Con­struct­ing a Moon Laser and threat­en­ing to rain fiery destruc­tion upon their piti­ful car­casses.
• Cre­ate a dummy orga­ni­za­tion focused on cut­ting into their mar­gins and then appear with the Only Pos­si­ble Way™ to fight off the com­peti­tor.
• Beer.

I had a brief chance to check out my old uni­ver­sity news­pa­per dur­ing a break in the direct­ing over the week­end. I jumped right to the View­point sec­tion to see if the same old was still the same old. And it is. I read a let­ter from two of my favorite pro­fes­sors that frankly and suc­cintly illu­mi­nates the cen­tral prob­lem at ND: a stu­dent social life retarded by a reac­tionary insti­tu­tion wield­ing an obso­lete morality.

Most of the peo­ple who ask me about Notre Dame seem sur­prised to hear that I hated it there. The only thing that kept me from trans­fer­ring to another school where I could have received an equiv­a­lently excel­lent edu­ca­tion was the fenc­ing team. My main rea­son for want­ing to leave was the imma­ture and uncon­struc­tive social life led by the stu­dents. The pit­falls of binge drink­ing have been dis­cussed to death, includ­ing the spec­tre of date rapel; but the causes of binge drink­ing itself are rarely touched upon. I’d like to offer my own sup­po­si­tions on this matter.

I was amazed at the sheer num­ber of Domers who had spent their entire lives ensconced within the Catholic school sys­tem. Even more amaz­ing to a coun­try boy like me was the fact that many of these same Domers has spent their entire lives ensconced in single-sex Catholic schools. Twelve years of seg­re­ga­tion and indoc­tri­na­tion in sex­ual repres­sion by sex­u­ally repressed priests and nuns. I’m not advo­cat­ing free love, here. Every­one is allowed to be as sex­u­ally repressed as they want to be; but I see an obvi­ous bias and fun­da­men­tal dis­con­nect with allow­ing the celi­bate to tell us how and when we should pork. It should be no sur­prise then, that when young men and women who have had lit­tle to no uncod­i­fied inter­ac­tion with the oppo­site sex and a life­time of sex­ual repres­sion finally come into every­day con­tact with each other that they have no knowl­edge of healthy mech­a­nisms with which to com­port themselves.

Enter the hookup cycle. The main rea­son my col­lege social life sucked. The week­end hits and every­one gets shit­faced and hooks up and pre­tends noth­ing hap­pened come Mon­day. Girls who have had 12+ years of nun-warnings about pro­tect­ing their vir­gin­ity have a cou­ple very bad first week­ends their fresh­man year when Boys who have had 12+ years of priest-admonitions finally let their pent up sex­ual energy go wild. Social life at ND reminded me more of Con­nersville Junior High School than one of the top 25 Uni­ver­si­ties in the nation.

And now the new Pres­i­dent of the Uni­ver­sity, Fr. Tim Jenk­ins, prob­a­bly as a result of his Bishop’s direc­tives, is fur­ther­ing and broad­en­ing the scope of sex­ual repres­sion on campus.

Of all things there are for a priest to get his panties in a twist about, The Vagina Mono­logues of all things, should be low on the list. For a brief time in col­lege I dated a strip­per. Who attended the Uni­ver­sity of Notre Dame. Who was smart as yeah. Who par­tic­i­pated in a packed house [in DeBar­tolo 101] per­for­mance of The Vagina Mono­logues. I was a mem­ber of the cam­pus Knights of Colum­bus at the time, and the Grand Knight tried to orga­nize a pray­ing of the rosary out­side of the room dur­ing the per­for­mance. I ran into one of my anthro pro­fes­sors, Fr. Gaffney on the way to the mono­logues and dis­cov­ered that he was going to the per­for­mance as well. The Grand Knight saw us com­ing and assumed we were there for the rosary. Woops. As a play I think the Vagina Mono­logues is crap, but its use­ful­ness in empow­er­ing both women and men in an exam­i­na­tion of the net­work of rela­tions between sex and gen­der roles is extremely impor­tant. Espe­cially in a repres­sive envi­ron­ment like Notre Dame.

Sim­i­larly, the University’s pantytwist about a GLBT Film Fes­ti­val is just as stu­pid. For a bunch of [seem­ingly] pow­er­ful celi­bate old men, wig­ging out over a movie or two is ridicu­lous. Yet all I have to do is think back to other things that have been wigged out about at ND [The Last Temp­ta­tion of Christ, that penis video at the stu­dent film fest, the VM every god­damn year, oth­ers I’m sure I’ve repressed by now] and I real­ize that the more things stay the same, the more they suck.

If the Uni­ver­sity aims to teach holis­tic and catholic val­ues, it needs to stop focus­ing on the worldly inter­pre­ta­tions of Catholic doc­trine, the imper­fect human inter­pre­ta­tions of God’s love for us, and real­ize that appre­cia­tive inquiry and dia­logue can do more to fos­ter Christ-like liv­ing than ostracism and close-minded tra­di­tion. I’m still work­ing my way through a rec­on­cil­i­a­tion between the good that the Church does and the harm it has done to me in terms of my own devel­op­ment, my own rela­tion­ships and my own under­stand­ing of the impor­tance of sex in my life. These are all per­sonal choices, and while the Church has every right to pro­vide its own guid­ance it shouldn’t restrict the expres­sion of dis­sent­ing opin­ions. The Uni­ver­sity always hears the rus­tle of money over rea­soned attempts at dia­logue, so until the stu­dents and fac­ulty of the Uni­ver­sity take orga­nized action on their own, or fig­ure out a way to make ND’s poli­cies hurt its pock­et­book I expect few things will change. I do know that when­ever I have chil­dren, I’ll encour­age them to attend a Uni­ver­sity that will pro­vide them with an open and wel­com­ing envi­ron­ment in which to edu­cate them­selves both men­tally and socially. If ND keeps on as it has been keep­ing on, it def­i­nitely won’t be on the list.

If you’ve sent an email in the past three days to my email account on this domain you need to send it again. The black­list on my web­mail isn’t the most intel­li­gent and spam­mers are ever devi­ous, so when I ran my black­list over the 70+ emails I had wait­ing for me this morn­ing all 100 or so of my emails were sum­mar­ily deleted and purged. This is because one of the email addresses on the black­list ended with an @, and the black­list then decides to delete mail from any domain after the @. Argh. Mr. Rijks, I know you sent me mail, [hola!] so please send it again, if you please. Please. That goes for the rest of you too.

This week­end I’m going to be direct­ing at the Notre Dame Fenc­ing Invi­ta­tional. It’s an easy way to make a cou­ple hun­dred dol­lars and an excuse to eat at CJ’s. I’m doing some seri­ous brush­ing up on my USFA rules, since I’ve not actu­ally fenced since I’ve grad­u­ated. [I can’t believe it.] The Invite is two long long days of fenc­ing, start­ing at 8 and usu­ally end­ing 8 or more hours later, so I’ll def­i­nitely earn my cash. Since I’m leav­ing after work today, I had to accom­plish all the nor­mal stuff I do on the week­end last night. So I did my laun­dry, got my car ser­viced, et cetera. But the Lube Stop broke the valve stem in one of my tires, so I ended up hav­ing to put on the donut in the sleet­ing rain and drive to NTB in Lake­wood for a replace­ment stem. The guy that fixed my car goes to the Greek Ortho­dox Church in Tremont, and another guy who was there wait­ing has a daugh­ter around my age that lives there.

I’m going to send a com­plaint to Lube Stop, and maybe next time I’ll get a free oil change. The whole affair killed about two hours of my time. Tremont West gave me a call because they’d like to send me to a lead­er­ship con­fer­ence in Nashville in May that is spon­sored