I dig my dog.

To see why I dig my dog, look at that little dogface!

Also see that I don't have bookcases or enough CD storage, please.

Thank you.

Sofa Suggestions

Freddie had a suggestion for a couch for me. I might pass, but suggestions are always welcome.

I don't think Ernie would be tempted to sit on the sofa...

babies and weirdness

So Jason and Jeannette Clark had their baby! Christopher William Clark (for the record, this is the second Chris/Cris Clark that I know...although I haven't met him yet...) was born a week ago at a whopping 8 lbs 5 oz... Babies are good.

And I heard from my friend Maryam in Ithaca the other day. We're sporadically in touch, but I just love her and her husband. She's an opera singer struggling with living in central New York and commuting to the City, he's a PhD candidate in German at Cornell. But the best part of her email yesterday described what her brother (who is a magician) is currently doing:

" nabil (her brother) is doing well- he's in saipan performing in a variety show where he does a midget michael jackson routine with another guy who plays the chimp- and no i am not kidding, and yes he is really getting paid (pretty darn well) to do this."

If I had a dollar for every time I heard that, I'd have a dollar.

I should should pour through the keyhole or evaporate completely...

I made a TMBG mix for someone this weekend, and I've had 3 things stuck in my head ever since:

1. The title of this post from "It's Not My Birthday" (and it's not my birthday but you can send gifts regardless)

2. a goodly portion of "Letterbox" which was my theme song with Specky when he moved back to Australia "If I had a pair of eyes in the back of my head for each time you forgot to think about all the things you forgot to talk about when you took a bite out of my spine, I would have a lot of eyes on the other side. Wouldn't I? Wouldn't that just be fine?"

3. Brief portions of my Fredlet's dance/tumbling number she did at Roubidoux High school at that Star-something contest when she got second (I still say she was robbed). I remember the costumes, the seeking behaviour at the beginning and something that my memory is telling me looked a lot like the Roger Rabbit...

The topic: The Daily Show

I love it but I rarely watch it anymore… I’ve been going to bed wicked early of late. But that aside, here’s a synopsis of last night’s TDS with John Kerry. I missed that one too, but I will see if I can try to catch its rerun tonight. Here’s what CNN had to say about it:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/08/24/kerry.daily.show.ap/index.html
I am also still curious about the Russian jet problems yesterday. I’m a sleepy monkey and I just plain wasn’t in the mood for coffee… but I grabbed a diet Mtn. Dew for the caffeination factor. I’m still looking for a coffee place to love… I miss the Coffee Bean (and Tea Leaf… that’s for you Annie. As is Disney’s California Adventure in Anaheim, California, USA, Earth, Solar System, Milky Way, Universe) or the Bean (that’s for you Jills). They have Peaberry coffee here. Their coffee is decent, better than Starbucks, but not handy to work…Common Grounds (see previous post) has adequate coffee, is independent, has fun people in it, but not open early enough for me to get to work with coffee and be on time.
Is there an ubertrendy name for the goth/hippie/yuppie people that I tend to be around a lot? They’re the ones with the fun hair, the cute glasses who ride bikes and carry messenger bags, and buy fun furniture.
I fell in love with a couch this weekend… but I’m afraid it was just the colors I loved… and it was comfy. It was at a Scandinavian furniture store (not Ikea, we don’t have those here), was biomorphically shaped, had a round swivel chair in the middle, and was happy colors like purple, pink and orange solid with polka dot throw pillows. It was also REALLY expensive and I’m afraid that if I buy it, I’ll just hate it in 3 years. And since I’m buying a BRAND NEW couch for the first time I’m feeling some responsibility for keeping it for a long time… Maybe I’ll get a fun one that isn’t quite so stylized… or expensive.

Happy Accidents

I spent this weekend getting to know my new computer and figuring out the headaches and joys that are wi-fi cafes... If you're in Denver and looking for a free wi-fi, I recommend Paris on the Platte filled with punks, goths, hippies, and yuppies with young families who watch the open coffee roaster, check their email, and chatting with friends and strangers. I ordered a veggie melt (with wonderfully yummy and spicy guacamole) and checking my email, upgrading Roxio so that I could transfer some of my analog music to digital (well, that's still in progress, and Freddie, if you know of a way to do that (particularly from cassette) without special software, I'd be ever in your debt and continually pour undying affection at your feet. If not, then it's to the curb with you... [grin]), and playing the new (to me) version of Solitaire: Spider (it's challenging like Freecell, and just a nice change of pace for time wasting). I also tried to go to Common Grounds to use their free wi-fi, but their connection was down (and I've overheard many people complain about that over the months I've been dropping in there).

That having been said, I just love my neighborhood.

On the couch shopping front, I found out that my sofa is worth more than I thought. It's too big for my apartment as it is, has a sleeper sofa and 2 recliners. When I get the check from my insurance company, I'll likely be able to buy a sleeper sofa (that will fit), possibly a big comfy chair for reading, bookcases (finally), a desk (finally), and with a little luck, my textbooks for fall, and with a lot of luck (and severe thriftiness on the previous purchases) an iPod... Which brings me back to the computer.

The computer is wunnerful! I also got an external CD-RW drive, which is too much fun for me (not that I'd ever break copyright laws and be joyful about it). And in downloading my music to my computer, I've discovered that I have a TON of cd's. If you've ever seen my cd's you're not surprised to hear this. But I was making a They Might Be Giants Mix for someone, and 2/3 of my TMBG collection alone was around 1.2 gb. So I'm thinking that I may need a 40 gb iPod when it comes to that... The 10 gb just ain't gonna cut it.

Also in fun things, I bought a messenger bag for school with tons of nifty pockets and zippers, some more blank cd-r's, and 2 cd's: Turin Brakes (a band they played on the radio when I lived in Maine and I LOVED) and TMBG's Flood. Finally. I had the cassette version of this in 1990, but sometime between now and then, I lost it. But now I've gots it.

Everybody wants a rock to wind a piece of string around.

Insurance stuff blows.

So, I've filed a claim with my insurance company about my sofa, and now my landlord is ticked.

This blows. I have confrontation. I loathe confrontation.

A cry for help

Nobody puts baby in a corner.

I carried a watermelon.

These 2 lines have been haunting me for the last 5 days... please make them stop. I don't even LIKE that movie...

where is my motivation?

I have none today.

Blah.

I saw Mary and Katie on Friday! It was fun... There were other people there too, but they're my peeps.

Okay, bye.

Backaches and leaks.

So there's the chance that there's a direct correlation between my pissy mood of the past few days, my current backache, and the inspiration to make superchocolatey brownies 2 nights ago.

Anyhow, this morning, I had to let the Ernieman out at around 4, which was surprisingly okay because we had slept for quite a long time preceding that (excluding the 1 am incident where I had to close my bedroom door to stop the barking out the living room window with no perceivable purpose). Then, when I woke up for real at 5, I walked to the bathroom to hop in the shower, and in the living room, almost in the doorway to the kitchen, I stepped in something wet. My first thought that while creature was barking at one, he decided to pee in the living room. Hence, I was annoyed as I cleaned up the puddle. But I got over it, and had one of those annoying episodes where you try-on-about-49-different-outfits-and-the-one-you-were-wearing-when-you-absolutely-couldn't-try-on-clothes-any-longer-because-that's-not-an-acceptable-excuse-for-being-late-to-work. Then I grabbed my cardigan that was tossed over the back of the sofa (and don't bother, my mother has told me for eons that the sofa isn't a closet), and putting it on discovered it was wet, too. As was the sofa. And my nice, name-brand bag (but at least it's water repellent). So, looking up, I realized, lo! The ceiling's leaking. And I looked at the ceiling over the spot wherein I stepped in a pubble at 5. It's leaking there too. But since I live in a basement apartment, the leaks are in the middle of the house, I find it highly unlikely that the kick-ass thunderstorm we had the night before was the culprit... unless the house over me (which is currently vacant) had a leak in the ceiling that accumulated so much water that it seeped through the floor and into my ceiling. Either way, it's bad, it's a pain, and I'm not loking forward to returning home because I doubt that the pots that I approximately placed under the leaks (which were linear and long) caught it all. Oy, vey.

Sleepy Puppet

I was up until almost 3:30 reading and cleaning up after my barfing puppy. Then I work up at 4:53 to get to work by 6:30.

Coffee please kick in. They laughed at me when I stared blankly at them for 20 seconds when they (the coffee slingers) asked if they could help me.

I'm in love with the Damien Rice cd O. I can't remember if I already posted that. I also got a Gine Forsyth cd this weekend. I used to go hear Gina play at the Neutral Ground when I lived in New Orleans (a great co-op coffee house that promoted independent singer-songwriters... also somewhat famous for being where Julie from Real World New Orleans played an open mic), then Gina, my friends Mina, Colleen and I would play Scrabble in the back while listening to other people play. But there's one song she wrote that I've been dying for a copy of: The Sweetest Sound. She always closed her set with it... such a great song. Gina's not the greatest singer, but she has this incredible penchant for songwriting. I also got Natalie Merchant's Ophelia for a copy of "My Skin" which is another one of those jaw-droppingly goregeous songs...

Okay, I have to work.

Monday, Monday...

I had bizarro dreams last night involving the power rangers, brownies, and senior living apartments. And an elementary school, too. It was really weird.

But now I really want a brownie from my mom's kitchen or Rocky Mtn. Chocolate Factory.

I bought a computer this weekend... I was going to get an iBook, but at the last minute I decided that it might just be too much of a pain in the tookus to try and take things that I'm working on at work and school and try to figure out how to make it all work. So I got a Dell 600m. I will hopefully have it in a few weeks. Spending that much money sent me into a case of the vapors.

I have Nine Inch Nails stuck in my head...

...and boy does it hurt!  Sorry, my friend Alan used to say that all the time.  I actually have Talking Heads in my head (that sounds like a job for a shrink...).  The SNL skit that parodied that "letting the days go by" where David Byrne says, "and you may ask yourself, why such a big suit?"  It's really funny.

 

Anyhow, I'm busy in a good way today, not about to be buried in work, but doing a lot of things, keeping me off crack and off the streets.

 

I have an insured parcel at the post office... I don't know who it's from, but oooh... how exciting!  I'm hoping it's a CD I ordered, but we'll see I suppose. 

 

I was up until 1:30 this morning.... bad news when you're waking up at 5.  But I feel mostly okay, as long as I don't think about it.  I spent a goodly part of the weekend fighting off a sinus infection, so the sudafed and the excedrin gave me the jitters, making it difficult to sleep.  But I won.  My sinuses feel fresh as a daisy, thank you.  I set a new Heather Sneeze Record yesterday: 18 consecutive sneezes!  It was ready for a nap when I was done....  Okay, back to work I go.