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Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
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2:15 pm - Drowning in a Foot of Soapy Water
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Rubber shoggoth, you're the one.
You make bath time lots of fun!
Rubber shoggoth, I'm awfully fond of you.
Bloop-e-oop-bloop-e-oop!
When I squeeze you, BIG SURPRISE!
You make loud, unholy cries!
Rubber shoggoth, I'm awfully fond of you.
(Bloop-bloop-bloop)
Every day, when I make my way to the altar,
I find a little fella who makes my soul kinda falter.
(I call him Walter.)
Even though I wail and whine,
I'm so lucky that you're mine.
Rubber shoggoth, you're my very best fiend, it's true.
Rubber shoggoth, I'm awfully 'fraid of you.
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, January 7th, 2010
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12:25 pm
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| Saturday, November 7th, 2009
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11:11 pm - True Story
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So fifteen minutes into Halloween this year, my cellphone rang. It was a really old friend, with whom I had lived for ten years or so off and on, who moved to California a few years ago. He's at a mutual old friend's house, he says, two miles away. So I get in the car.
It's after midnight so no beer or liquor is for sale to-go in my county, so I arrive empty handed, but they have a little wine left and one six pack of beer. I begin to agitate for going out, having decided we're going to be up all night. The question is whether to go to a bar or to drive twenty or thirty minutes each way to another county to get booze to go.
The mutual friend's girlfriend's phone rings, and it turns out to be her high school boyfriend, to whom she has not spoken in over a decade. He is at the airport, having just got in from South Africa with no plans. It is like 1:00 in the morning.
The mutual friend is acting understandably but unfortunately threatened. His girlfriend is on the phone forever, and the mutual friend is acting out more and more. The music is by now unbearably loud, for example. Eventually after much to-do it is decided that the ex will grab the subway to Shaw and meet us in a bar around there. By now it is five minutes to two and I am sure he will have missed the last train, but whatever. We pile into the truck and head down to the bar.
The mutual friend buys rounds of beer and whiskey. It is now three; the bar closes. We're standing on the sidewalk debating. The ex has no cell-phone. He was using Skype from the airport wireless. We have no way to know what is up with him. But the last train was an hour ago and should have taken fifteen or twenty minutes to drop him off a block from us. We should just go.
We have just made that decision when up walks the ex! We get acquainted a little bit on the sidewalk and then pile into the truck and head back to the mutual friend's house, where we stay up until 5:30 or so. Clearly the ex is in fact trying to make time with the mutual friend's girlfriend. I am ignoring this but also subtly cutting in and disrupting the spell he is trying to weave, playing my classic wide-eyed idiot self. =) The mutual friend is trashed and slurring and riding a BMX bike around the room, stopping to do things like play percussion on an aluminum upright bass and lecture us on things that make sense in his profoundly drunken head.
Holy crap, it's 5:30; I gotta get some sleep, guys. The other four are all staying there. I leave, wondering what will come of it all.
...
So today, the old friend comes by on his way out of town. Fantastic, I am stoked. I get him a beer. I ask him if there is any juicy gossip from Saturday morning. "Heh. Oh yeah," he says, "Well, Saturday afternoon.
"Saturday afternoon we got up and went to go get breakfast before we were gonna take him to go get a hotel room. In the diner, there's a bathroom that has two ways to get to it. One direct and one long. [The ex] is standing in the way of the direct path.
"So a cop comes up and says to him, 'Excuse me.'
"He says to the cop, 'Go around.'
"The cop says, 'Excuse me? No. Excuse me, please.'
"He says to the cop, 'You need to brush your teeth.'
"So the cop cuffs him and takes him outside. Then, I dunno if he mouths off more outside or what, but eventually the cop comes back in with [the ex's] backpack and says, 'Well, I'm taking him in. He wants you guys to hold onto his backpack.'
"Well, we all said no. So the cop took him and the backpack away, and that's the last we heard of him."
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(16 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, August 19th, 2009
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7:45 pm - Living in a Powder Keg and Giving Off Sparks
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| Thursday, June 18th, 2009
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1:15 pm - power to the people
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For you Twitter people.. set your location to Tehran and your time zone to GMT +3.30. Security forces are hunting for bloggers using location/timezone searches. The more people at this location, the more of a logjam it creates for forces trying to shut Iranians' access to the internet down. Cut-n-paste & pass it on.
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(4 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, March 4th, 2009
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11:00 am - One Year Later
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| Friday, January 2nd, 2009
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7:00 pm - Help Me Obi-Wan, You're My Only Hope
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Hi friends! I reckon one or more of you might have done something like this.
So someone (you know who you are, and thanks!) gave me some wicked cool speakers. They've got those clamp style wire hookups. I have a receiver with a b-channel outs, for setting up speakers in another room. It's RCA. I don't want to run wires, because that will mess up my victorian house with the drilling or mess up the looks with exposed cables. Do you know if there's a viable a wireless solution? Link me? Thanks!
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(5 comments | comment on this)
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| Saturday, December 6th, 2008
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10:00 pm - O_O
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| Wednesday, November 26th, 2008
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8:00 pm - YES! I Still Got It Goin' On Ya'll
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I remember that evening in 2004 when I realized my dream had come true and I was a black woman.
Today, four years later and just in time for Thanksgiving, I arrived home to a free sample issue of Uptown. Oh yeah. Thank you very much.
current mood:  jubilant
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(comment on this)
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| Saturday, November 8th, 2008
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1:45 pm - Little Rubber Foot, Denoument
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As you may recall I posted a while ago (Victory is Mine, 17 October 2008, 10:30 pm) I spent an hour and a half on the phone with HP in Bangalore, arguing and escalating and arguing and escalating, until they finally agreed to send me a replacement little rubber foot for the bottom of my lappy for free instead of for $85.
Briefly here's what happened:
1. Customer service told me that though my $1700 lappy was still under warranty (for four more days), Technical Support had advised him that this was considered customer damage and I would have to pay $85 for a replacement. I escalated to Technical Support. Yes, I will hold, thank you.
2. Technical support said they didn't have the kit in stock and I would have to call back in two days, does that resolve my issue? No. Yes I will hold. Rinse and repeat for 20 minutes. No, this is still not okay. Would it be okay with you? Get me your manager. Yes, I'll hold. For twenty minutes.
3. Look, manager, you're going to get it back in stock, right? So put me down for one when they come in. I am not getting off the phone until I have email saying I am getting it. Yes, I will hold, for twenty minutes, and again for another twenty.
Amazingly she somehow managed to find one somewhere on earth and transfer me to the person who could mail it to me for free, that night. I gave her my address, thanked her kindly and hung up.
So, a few days ago, it arrived! In a common ziplock sandwich bag in a padded envelope. Here is what HP wanted me to pay $85 for, to real-life scale on my 1440x900 resolution:
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(4 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
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4:30 pm - Stratfor Geopolitical Weekly: Obama’s Challenge
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| Tuesday, November 4th, 2008
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11:45 pm
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| Friday, October 17th, 2008
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10:30 pm - Victory is Mine
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I just spent an hour and a half on the phone with HP in Bangalore, arguing and escalating and arguing and escalating, until they finally agreed to send me a replacement little rubber foot for the bottom of my lappy for free instead of for $85.
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Thursday, October 9th, 2008
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3:15 pm - Root Cause Analysis
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| Friday, September 26th, 2008
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11:30 am - Stratfor on Foreign Policy and the Presidential Contenders
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"The next president will have to start drafting his first defense budget shortly after taking office. If he chooses to engage all of the challenges, he must be prepared to increase defense spending. If he is not prepared to do that, he must concede that some areas of the world are beyond management. And he will have to decide which areas these are."
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Thursday, September 11th, 2008
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9:15 pm - \m/ ò_ó \m/
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| Tuesday, July 29th, 2008
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3:45 pm - On Second Thought
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I drove to work yesterday. Traffic sucks. I am a metro commuter. It may take twice as long but I can read and do puzzles instead of just practicing The Art of Patience and Relaxation Under Adverse Conditions.
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008
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11:45 am - Ruminating on (or perhaps bitching about) My Commute
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(I told all this to David, and he told me I should post it to my bjournal, so here you go.)
I live c.1 mile from the PG Plaza Metro station, and a bus stops across the street and two doors down to take me there in about 5 to 7 minutes. My work is right next door to the Suitland metro station - gmaps pedometer says it's 0.3 miles from the center of the platform to the elevator by my desk, as the commuter walks. This trip, from getting on the bus to butt-in-chair at work, or vice-versa, takes about 1 hour 5 minutes and costs $9.50 a day.
My company provides a public transit benefit if one asks. So I asked, and I now have a SmarTrip card that gets automagically loaded with $110/month through the SmartBenefits program - which gives my company a tax break so it's win-win I guess. But $110 will only cover 11.5 days of this, so I still have half a month of commuting to cover by driving or paying my own way on metro.
I am liking the metro, a lot, actually. But, the original purpose of this was to save money, so I did the math.
In my car, my commute is 11.6 miles in the morning and takes about 20 minutes, and 17.5 miles in the evening which takes about 40 minutes. (I take the beltway home because driving north on the BW Parkway in the evening is absolutely horrific.) So, 29.1 miles. My car gets 25-27 mpg, but I went with 25. I get my gas for $3.99 a gallon at my local Shell station. This means it costs me about $4.65 a day to drive.
Metro: 2 hours 10 minutes; $9.50 per day
Drive: 1 hour; $4.65 per day
Metro is more than twice as expensive and takes more than twice as long.
That is downright lame. I suppose I could look at it over a month and tell myself that the metro benefit lowers my daily cost of metro transit to $4.25, but that's illusory. The fact is that the benefit makes my commute free half the month, and I need to choose the cheapest option for the other half - and that is driving, and that sucks bilge water.
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(23 comments | comment on this)
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| Saturday, June 28th, 2008
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5:30 pm - Sunshine
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| Tuesday, June 17th, 2008
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2:45 pm - Belief
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So last night we went to Costco. I spent some time keeping Maggie busy with a 2-foot by 3-foot picture book entitled The Wonders of the World - showing her a two-page spread, telling her where it is and its significance, etc.
One of the spreads was of the Kaaba during the Hajj. I said, "Wow, look at this! Have you ever seen a picture of so many people together in one place before? What happens is, every year, all of the Muslims in the world that are going to get to go that year, all go at the same time to see this building and do other religious things around there. Muslims are people that worship God in a little bit different way than Christians do. Anyway, this building is empty, with nothing in it but God. Muslims say that Abraham built it. Do you know about Abraham?"
"No," said Maggie.
"Well," I said, "Christians believe in Abraham, too."
"Oh," says Maggie. "Well, I do believe in Abraham, I mean I believe he was real. I just never heard about him before."
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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castironskillet's journal
