Be careful what you open, and who’s watching. When you know you have friends who like to give you gifts like a man-shaped pen holder that moans when you put a ball-point in his ass, don’t open it up in front of the small children who will insist on playing with it.
Archive for 2006
Christmas Embarrasment #2
Monday, December 25th, 2006Christmas Embarrassment #1
Sunday, December 24th, 2006I’m demoralized. My two little nieces have managed to soundly whip my ass at everything I’ve put on the game consoles, including the ones I thought I was good at. I suck.
Happy Holidays
Friday, December 22nd, 2006Best wishes for whatever holidays and or natural phenomena you may or may not be celebrating this time of year. Best wishes for an incredible new year, too.
It’s been a good year for me, in a lot of ways. I’m gainfully employed, my health is good (if you don’t count this damned flu I’ve been fighting for the last week), and my family’s doing well. There may have been a few frustrations and disappointments during the course of the year, but when all the really important things have turned out at least OK, I can’t say I have much to complain about.
I’m finding myself pretty thankful for my friends, who are about as fine a group of people as I could wish for. I’m also very grateful for all the new people I’ve met this year, either virtually, in real life, or both. I must be doing something right, because somehow I’ve managed to add a few new people to my life in the last year who’ve helped me through the rough patches, been there to congratulate me on the good stuff, or who’ve just been a hell of a lot of fun to have around. Some have been all of the above. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but it makes me feel pretty good about the kind of person I am when I notice how great the people are that I’ve managed to gather around me.
While I’m on the subject of thankfulness, I’m also grateful to anyone who’s dropped by here in the last several months, for all the new music I’ve discovered (either on my own, or via recommendations from some of the people I was thankful for in the preceding paragraph), for all the people who’ve accused me of lying when I told them I was 40, and last, but not least, for all the gorgeous guys who ride the BART system.
If this keeps up, 2007 is going to be one hell of a year.
Katie Rocks (and so do the Gimmes)
Saturday, December 16th, 2006The Me First and the Gimme Gimmes gig was last night at Slim’s, and I had a blast.
If you ever get a chance to take Katie out on a Friday night, I highly recommend it. She had me laughing for most of the night, she looks good shakin’ the read hair when the music gets good, she hails a cab far better than I, and she wasn’t kidding when she said she’d buy beer. However, if you do ever get her out somewhere, I do have one warning: “You don’t mess with the ta-tas.” I’m not sure I want to go into the circumstances that prompted her to tell me that.
The opener was a literally painful set by a band named The Charm School Dropouts — though I have to give a small grudging bit of respect to a band who can manage to cover both a song by Turbonegro (Good Head) and a song by Lynyrd Skynyrd (Freebird) in a roughly six-song set.
What the Charm School Dropouts lacked, though, the Gimmes more than made up for. While they did play a decent amount of stuff from the new album, Love Their Country, the set covered a range of songs from every album in their catalog. The only real disappointment was that they never played Mandy, which was a bit of a bummer for Katie.
Still, I can’t complain about the set. Any time I get to see a bunch of tough-looking young punks viciously slam-dancing to Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Danny’s Song and Tomorrow, I’m going to call it a good time.
Speaking of young punks… maybe I don’t get out as often I used to, or maybe it’s something in the water out here in San Francisco, but I’d swear they’ve gotten better-looking than I remember them. Out of respect for my date for the evening, among other factors, I restrained myself from drooling on any of them the entire night, but it took a constant exertion of self control to pull it off.
Oh, and I’m glad to say I survived a brief brush with the pit. It wasn’t as intentional thing, and it was only a brief moment on the periphery, but I made it through without breaking a hip. Hooray for me.
I’ve Got a Date for Friday!
Wednesday, December 13th, 2006I just realized I never posted an update in here about my shameless efforts to get someone to go to the Me First and the Gimme Gimmes show with me Friday. Bad blogger!
My date for the evening will be LiveJournal’s own her_kateness, who wrote in with a truly gut-wrenching, tear-jerking tale of lost love, booze, and dancing with Barry Manilow that soundly trounced what little competition she had. I mean, it wasn’t even close.
I’m looking forward to it. On her blog over at Vox she describes herself as “Cute, SUPER smart and dorky, all in one.” I don’t see how we could possibly not get along.
Is It 2007 Yet?
Monday, December 11th, 2006Got back last night from Chistmas at Mom’s. It was a good trip. Lots of family, a decent amount of wine and beer, and not too many early-morning wakeup screams from my infant nephew Aidan (who, for the record, is adorable as hell. Far cuter than any of your nephews, I’m sure).
My timing’s a bit thrown off, though. There’s the rhythm that usually comes along with the end of the year. There’s Thanksgiving, then a gradually-building stress level over the next month as I get closer and closer to not having everything done that I need done before Christmas. Following that four-week period is the Big Day. Stress levels drop, and there’s a one-week lull before the New Year’s denoument.
This year, I had a two-week, compressed stress period, followed by the Big Day (or one of them, at least), to be followed by another two weeks of stress before another Big Day, and only one week after that will I finally make it to New Year’s Eve. It’s not right, and it’s messing with my internal calendar. I don’t know whether I should get really drunk next weekend or go to a mall. Or both.
I’d probably handle malls a lot better if I got good and trashed first, anyway. I’m sure one of the levels of hell is a shopping mall, and that may be the main thing that keeps me from becoming a serial killer. Heaven may be full of a bunch of really boring bible-thumping bingo players, but if the alternative is an eternity in the food court between Sears and Macy’s, I’ll take bingo.
An Early Christmas
Wednesday, December 6th, 2006My mom’s in the God business. She’s a minister, which can make coordinating family get-togethers on major holidays difficult to pull of. When most families are together hunting Easter eggs, Mom’s doing three Sunday services. Christmas morning, she can usually be found in a church as well, since (though it’s relatively little-known) Christmas was once a primarily religious observance.
As a result, we tend to be more flexible than most as to when we celebrate holidays. For example, this year Christmas will be coming to my mother’s house on our around December 10th. In case that seems sacrilegious to you, I would like to remind you that it’s highly improbable that shepherds are unlikely to have been tending their flocks outdoors in mid-winter, not to mention the unlikelihood that Mary would have been popping her little holy bun out of the oven at a time when there’s a good chance she’d have frozen back shut before the little haloed head could breach. Given the low probability that anyone’s got the day right, anyway, it hardly seems blasphemous to fudge the date a little for the sake of familial convenience.
So, I’ll be making a trek out to Mom’s this weekend. She’s recently moved to a cute little place out in the woods, so it should feel very Christmasy and be appropriately pine-scented indoors and out. My brother and sister will be there, and the little nephews (who are never as little as I remember them), and I’m really looking forward to it.
In addition to being foresty and charming, Mom’s place is also conveniently located between some mountains and the ocean, far from any cell phone towers, which means my usual fallback mode of Internet access probably won’t work. Don’t expect to hear much from me before I return (though I’ll do my best to announce the winner of the “Win a Date with Me and the Gimmes” contest sometime Friday, somehow).
It’ll be tough for me to without Internet for a few days, but if Mary could do it, in the middle of winter, I’m sure I can too.
An Accidental Cuddle
Tuesday, December 5th, 2006There haven’t been much in the way of photogenic BART riders as of late. It may be the colder weather we’ve been having; it’s hard to spot a cute guy when he’s buried under several layers of wool and has a hood pulled over his head.
However, this morning more than made up for the recent shortage, when I found myself right in the middle of a pair of them. First, the one to my left, who had a certain boyish Corey Hart thing going.
However, cute though Lefty may have been, I have say he was a bit upstaged by the guy on my right. He looked a bit like a young Bruce Campbell, which might almost be enough for me to have crowned him Hottest Guy on the BART for December 5, 2006. It turns out that was the least of his charms, though.
Righty, it seems, must have had a long night last night, and he fell asleep almost immediately after sitting down next to me. Then, just a moment after I snuck this shot of him, we hit a rough stretch of track. He bounced around a bit, wobbled, and settled back down with his head resting on my shoulder. It only lasted a couple minutes, and he had flopped back the other way before he woke up, so he may never know the tender moments the two of us shared, cuddled up together in the back of the BART.
Or maybe he does know, and I blew a really good chance to cop a cheap feel. Who knows?
Why Can’t I Just Buy a TV?
Friday, December 1st, 2006I had the misfortune today to have to try to decide what should replace the old, fading rear-projection TV taking up a huge chunk of my living room. After wading through all the options, including plasma, DLP, CRT, LCD, 4:3, 16:9, 720p, 1080i, and a whole lot of other acronyms and numbers, I’m beginning to think I’d be better off living in a cave with nothing but a blanket and a campfire. Oh, and a high-speed internet link. Anyone know where fiber-to-the-cave might be available?
It’s almost embarrassing. I consider myself a real tech-head, and I’ve got all kinds of electronic gadgets floating around the house. I can whip up a traffic-shaping bridge and transparent web proxy before breakfast. I was building radios for fun when I was five years old. I didn’t even sweat when I had to crack open my Tivo and upgrade the hard drive. I start loking at TV sets, though, and my brain shuts down.
I suppose my ignorance of all things TV is partially because I’m just not a TV-watching guy. I listen to the TV while I do other things, and that’s only because someone else is watching it in the same room. If it were up to me, I probably wouldn’t ever turn it on. Since I rarely even look at the TV, picture quality just isn’t something I can get fanatical about. It’s easier to learn when you’re interested in the subject, and I’m so utterly uninterested in TV technology that as soon as I do manage to learn something, it flies right out to leave more room for things like routing protocols and song lyrics.
Call me a Luddite, but I think I liked it better when the only thing I had to decide was “color or black and white?”
Contest Update
Monday, November 27th, 2006To my own surprise, I’ve actually received a few entries to my “Win a Date with Me and the Gimmes” contest. I’m going to have a hard time picking a winner, especially if I keep getting entries as good as the ones I’ve seen so far.
At this point I’m chalking it up more to the drawing power of Me First and the crew than to my own ability to get a date, but either way it’s good to know somebody will be using that second ticket.
