All Ills Cured with Shopping

All Ills Cured with Shopping

Ah. Employment.

I find it hard to believe it can be this refreshing, but it truly is... after only 6 days back in the world of full time employment, I'm feeling relaxed, ready to take on anything. Well, almost anything. Not Roseanne Barr for example. But anything else.

This morning Bonny and I slept late after a night out with friends to see a movie ("Zoolander" -- very funny. Stupid as stupid can be, but if you're looking for a comedy with a message, go rent "M*A*S*H" or "Network") and have a late dinner. We didn't even really get going until around 2pm. Even then, all we did was partake of that ultimate unemployed person's pastime: spending money we don't really have yet. But it sure feels like we do.

There's a relatively nice comic shop in nearby Worcester called That's Entertainment. I dragged Bonny along to it with me for her first trip there. I stopped there once a year ago when a comic book writer that I used to like a lot was there... he's also a big supporter and board member of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, the non-profit 1st Amendment Rights defending organization that I'm the Webmaster for. I figured that would give me a reason to talk to him, even though most of his most recent comic book work has left me cold. But I couldn't bring myself to talk to him. Part of it may have been sheer nervousness, but as I heard him talk to people he came off as both pompous and uber-geeky (big fat scruffy middle-aged guy with a high-pitched voice).

The store has a nice big selection, lots of non-comics stuff like toys and models and artwork, and a warehouse of back issues. I never even look at back issue bins anymore, sadly. Finding comics to fill holes in my collection used to be one of my most joyous pastimes as a kid, but now it seems such a waste of money. Better to just stop buying the regular monthly issues and if they're any good, they get collected in a trade paperback reprint.

Even with all this stuff, I perused the place for 45 minutes before I found something I felt I couldn't live without: Brian Michael Bendis's Jinx (visit his site to listen to one of the best MIDI tunes ever: the theme to Wonder Woman!). Of course, I paid full price for it, when Amazon has it for $7 bucks less. Sigh. Bendis, by the way, is the hot new guy in comics, who has helps revamp Spider-Man and has written some amazing crime comics, including Jinx and one called Torso that's all about how Eliot Ness (of Untouchables fame) real did track down one of America's first serial killers in Cleveland.

Bendis is younger than me. Bendis draws, too. I hate Bendis.

From the comic shop, we decided to check out the Worcester Common Outlets, a place we'd seen many times while passing through the city on Interstate 290. Turns out it's a two story mall in the middle of the deadest downtown we'd ever seen on a Saturday. Bon actually thought maybe there'd been a bomb scare or something, but nothing was cordoned off, so we hit the (empty) parking garage ($.99 for 2.5 hours!). The place looked brand new. It was carpeted throughout. You don't see many carpeted malls. But, half the stores were empty, as in, there were no businesses in them at all. But, they had nice anchor stores: Bed Bath and Beyond beckoned to us with its superiority over our local Linens and Things, and we've always liked MediaPlay, the books/music/software and a whole lot of other crap store.

As we were looking at the software display, we saw a copy of the original Diablo on sale, and Bon started to salivate. She'd played the original to the end, and then the sequel to the end. We're talking hours of game play here, time that not only will she never get back, but a distraction for her that gave me lots of time to surf porn on the Web. I mean, uh, to sit and watch anything I wanted on TV. Well, I do that anyway. I guess really, it doesn't mean squat. Except to her hygiene.

"God I love that game," she said wistfully.

"I know you did. But when we got Diablo II, I didn't see you for weeks. And when you did come out of your office, your hair was like white-woman dreadlocks, and your finger nails were curled and yellow, I was amazed you could even play a computer game. Your breath was like from some undead thing, because all you drank was Jolt cola and you'd lost a few molars. Good thing we never got the expansion pa--"

"THERE'S AN EXPANSION PACK???"

So I ended up buying Diablo II Expansion: Lord of Destruction, also at full price. Of course, Amazon has it for about 6 bucks less... But I guess that's the price a shopper pays. Instant gratification.

She's upstairs playing the game right now.

The Adventures of SkidMark and Ass-Boy

One of the funniest things I ever read on the Web was Jon Hargrave's Olé Olestra!, a personal account of what happened when he ingested an incredibly large amount of the fat substitute Olestra in one week and never changed his underwear. I read it, made everyone at work read it, shared it with friends around the Internet. It was joyously funny. (By the way, Hargrave's one of the funniest guys online. I read his Zug.com journal every day and highly recommend it.)

Any story that features the words "anal leakage" in the second paragraph is, to me, and most civilized beings, hysterical. Well, maybe not what you're reading now, but you haven't finished yet.

I'm bringing up the topic of anal leakage because, well, my wife dared me. I don't know why she did it. She knows I'm not afraid of delving into
scatological topics . Perhaps she thought I would forget because I was distracted by running around the kitchen singing the theme song from the old 60's Batman TV show, but with the name of a new hero:

"Nah-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-naaaah--ASS-Boy!"

Ass-Boy is a new nickname Bonny coined last night for our beloved yellow Labrador, Caper. I just decided to adapt it to a theme song. (Aside: Siren, the chocolate Lab, also has a theme song, sung to the tune of the theme to I Dream of Jeannie. The words: "Siren, Siren the poop-dog, Siren, Siren, the poop-dog, Siren, Siren the poop-dog, she Poops." Or something like that. I'm no Howard Ashman.)

It's a wonder Caper didn't earn the Ass-Boy moniker much earlier in life, as he's always had a major problem with anal leakage (see, it all comes together eventually). This is not really unique to him. All dogs have anal glands "on either side of the anus at the 9:00 and 3:00 positions; they are just under the skin. They connect to the anus by means of small canals or ducts. Anal sacs produce and store a dark, foul-smelling fluid. These are the same type of organs that a skunk has to scare away its enemies. Although dogs can use these for the same purpose, most dogs live in an environment that has no enemies. Because the sacs are rarely emptied, the fluid builds up, solidifies, and becomes an ideal environment in which bacteria can grow." (The preceding is from the AnimalClinic.com Anal Gland Disease page, if you want to read up on more. Better yet, check out the anal sac Flash animation.)

I've never, in my entire life, known a dog with this issue, let alone a dog that would squirt butt sap at its enemies. So it makes perfect sense that when I own my own furniture and own my own pets so I can let lay them upon the aforementioned furniture, said pet would repay that courtesy by leaving his skunky ass juice upon the upholstery. Cleaning it up wouldn't be such a problem -- we've got great chemicals for that -- but the reek is so overpowering that we'd welcome a rabid badger into the living room to watch "Who's Line" with us.

Caper doesn't let loose with the Parfum le Anus on a regular basis. He can go weeks, sometimes months without -- as Bonny likes to call it -- an explosion. Yet he manages to store it up so that when it happens, it happens with a vengeance.

One other major problem that comes with the leakage is that I'm a guy, with a completely unrefined sense of smell. Bon's olfactory sense, on the other hand, is so super-heightened I sometimes wonder if she isn't part canine.

I'll can be sitting on the couch with Caper curled up next to me with his head on my lap, Bon will be across the room in the easy chair. I'll have just eaten a tuna fish sandwich, sprayed some pine-scent Lysol after a visit to the loo, and the house will be filled with the stench of burning fish-wrap paper after I started a fire in the fireplace without opening the flue. Yet Bonny's head will rocket up, her nostril's will flare as she sniffs, and then she'll say:

"Do you smell that?"

"Smell what?" I'll reply, trying to concentrate on the tube.

Answering a question with a question, never a good idea. Moments later, I'm suddenly, under orders, wiping my dog's ass with a tissue, trying to prevent anal sac moisture from contacting with the cover of our futon couch. For there is no higher crime in the Griffith household than for canine crack dampness to touch the dry-clean only surfaces. I personally try not to hold these leaky bouts against Caper, but by this point, I can smell it myself, and I'd rather roll in the grass at the dog park.

Yesterday, I was hard at work in my basement office and the AOL Instant Messenger window popped up. It was Bonny, from her office on the second floor. (I'm not using her real screenname to protect her from you stalkers.)

WIFEY-POO: sometimes I hate having dogs.
ECGRIFFITH: oh hon, I know they demand a lot of our time, but I know you realize how cute they are, and how much we love them...
WIFEY-POO: caper just scooted his ass across my carpet and left ass-juice all over!
ECGRIFFITH: Caper who? Who is this?

The rest of the day was spent calling Caper "Ass-Boy," which I thought was funny because it has the same number of syllables as Bat-man, and plus, it wasn't my carpet. But we decided that leaving Siren without a cool super-hero name wasn't fair, so as of today, she's "SkidMark." I'm thinking for Halloween they each get a mask with a cape, with logos that say "SM" and "AB" in front of a shield.

If only they still made chips with Olean brand olestra... I'm thinking they'd make an interesting supplement to Caper's all natural diet. As long as Ass-Boy's spending all his time in Bon's office.

Party Time?

Party Time?

This is from a press release.... I have got to get that last one (in bold)...

Party City offers the following look at past and present hot picks for Halloween costumes:

The 1970s and 80s ... Wigs were BIG in the 70s. Lyndsay Wagner (as the Bionic Woman) and superstar John Travolta were favorites of this decade. In the 80s, make-up and face paint were popular, as were the pre-packaged costumes of Atari video game icons such as Pac-Man and Asteroids and television-inspired favorites including Mr.T, Alf, He-Man and the Smurfs.
The 1990s and 2000 ... In the 1990s, costume separates and accessories began to make their mark. "You no longer would see just an ordinary nurse - instead you'd see a "crazy nurse" with vampire teeth and fake blood dripping out of her mouth, carrying an oversized needle," says Bailen. Elaborate designs, especially those with medieval and renaissance themes, were also quite popular with adults.
And for 2001 ... "With kids, we can expect to see many dressed up as their current favorites: Harry Potter, Shrek, Bob the Builder and Josie and the Pussy Cats," Bailen predicts. Some of the hot accessories to accompany these outfits include Harry Potter glasses, broom and owl; tool belt, construction hat and gloves for Bob the Builder; and cat ears, tails, boas, and platform shoes for Josie and the Pussy Cats.
For teens and adults in 2001, Party City "hot picks" include more creative and theme-driven variations. Bailen adds: "The adults seem to be spending far more on accessories for themselves than they are for their children. They're also choosing more colorful, humorous costumes than they have in the past. We're seeing everything from gothic witches accented with tattoos and jewelry to inflatable sumo wrestlers."

No more Résumés!

Well. After three and a half months of unemployment -- my new personal record! -- I've got a job.

Any second now I'll be signing a letter making me the latest managing editor to join the fold at Internet.com. Next week, I'll be taking over running the company's Practically Networked, which covers SOHO and small biz networking hardware (and when I'm done, software, and maybe some book reviews, and anything else useful). I intend to make that site SING, baby.

I also intend to start calling it PracNet all the time, because typing out the full name is exhausting. *Yawn.*

How did I land such a job? Not my intense background in networking I'll tell you that -- I've got good friends, that's how. Both my former coworkers and friends Laura and Kieron, who both work at Internet.com forwarded me a message from my former boss, Gus, who runs the place. I made calls, tried unsuccessfully not to be annoying, and finally drove down yesterday to Darien, Connecticut to talk to Gus. I think he would have given me the job there, but HR needed to check me out first (I had to sign some papers saying it was okay for them to do a credit check on me... never had that before).

Internet.com can be a strange company -- they own around 160 sites, all mushed together in a very un-cohesive whole -- but say what you will, they're still in business in a year that saw a lot of great ideas and businesses (and buildings) go south. They don't spend money unnecessarily -- for example, they kept their sites on servers in their office for years before they got to a point where they took them off site. Meanwhile, the geniuses that ran the Web site at AccessMagazine.com had the site hosted in a building in Ohio that was on springs to prevent an earthquake from interrupting service. The difference there: Internet.com was making money while running servers in a closet. AccessMagazine.com was spending thousands a month for hosting, but only ever sold one advertisement for the site. How's that for old economy vs. new/net economy.

Better yet kids... I'll be working from home. No commute. None. Nada. Zippo. Zilch. Well, unless you count walking in my PJs to the basement from my second floor bedroom a commute. I wonder if I fall down the stairs, do I get workman's compensation?

Well, time to go walk the dogs and celebrate. Spread the words to friends and family about the joyous news. Oh, and I know this blog has been mostly about my suffering as an unemployed loser for so many months -- but I shall not neglect it. It shall flourish even more in the transition to my work at home status.

Unemployable No More, or 'How I got my first Job'

When I graduated from Ithaca College, I was living with my girlfriend, Bonny. She was one of only three people I knew in my graduating class that had a job -- she'd been hired to start in the Macy*s (you have to spell it with an asterisk) management training program in June. The economy at the end of the Bush administration was in the toilet and I questioned whether I'd ever get a job once I left working in college dining services.

I had been applying for editorial positions all over the northeast of the U.S. for months, but had no luck. Closest I got was an interview to work in the publicity department of TOR, the sci-fi/fantasy imprint of St. Marin's press, located in the Flatiron Building in New York City. I did the interview, took a test, even wrote a sample press release for them (having never seen a press release before) and when I got the ding by phone, I was devastated.

By the end of May, Bonny and I had moved out of our apartment in Ithaca and put our stuff in storage with our folks as I contemplated what to do. I had three choices really: go to New Jersey and live with Bonny as she commuted into Manhattan, stay in Hornell and keep looking for a job that would get me out, or spend the rest of my life in Hornell thinking about getting out. The latter seemed to happen to too many people -- and has happened to too many of the people I know even now.

That was my epiphany: get out of Hornell right then or I might never get out. In my life, that's probably my big "It's a Wonderful Life" divergent moment, where my whole future would have been drastically different otherwise. I'd probably now be living in a trailer while working at the Hornell Evening Tribune, writing about high school soccer games and playing role-playing games on weekends.

So I went to New Jersey. Turns out I wouldn't be bored -- my writing professor at Ithaca helped me set up a summer internship with a film production office in Manhattan. I wouldn't get paid, but I'd get to see how the film industry worked. Sort of.

Bonny and I lived practically for free in the basement of a house owned by the crazy mother of a friend of ours from Ithaca. The crazy mother would check in on us at strange times and made living there weird and uncomfortable, as did the creepy guy who lived up stairs that we had to share a kitchen with.

Every weekday we took the bus into the city to the Port Authority, which is truly a wretched hive of scum and villainy. There are few places scarier, and it was worse in 1992 than it is now. Bon would go from there to 7th Avenue and 34th Street, to the gigantic Macy*s store. I went north to 57th Street, walking up 8th Avenue, which I thought was pretty scary at the time... good think I never ventured toward 10th or I might have soiled myself.

On 57th, down the block from Carnegie Hall, the Russian Tea Room, and Planet Hollywood, I would enter the magical world of movie making. Which turned out to be a cramped two room apartment converted into the NYC offices of Spring Creek Productions. The job of the two guys there: read a lot of scripts and decide if they were viable as movies.

But they never read scripts. Other people, freelancers mostly, read scripts and wrote 250 word synopses of the scripts (called "the coverage") and based on that, the guys in the office might read the scripts. Well, Paul, the guy I worked with (he was a former IC grad and friends with my writing prof, that's how I got the internship), he read some). The other guy I don't know what he did. I guess he schmoozed a lot.

I worked on their Mac Classic computer using a FileMaker Pro database to log scripts and mark them as a pass or a possibility. I read lots of scripts, some of which were okay, but most sucked. I read book galleys that were also submitted by publishers or authors to see if they could get the film rights optioned sooner rather than later. One of my favorite books of all time I read in that office in galley form: Steven Gould'sJumper (which, coincidentally, was published in hardcover that year by TOR books). I wrote coverage of the novel, about a boy who inexplicably finds he has the ability to teleport, and gave it glowing praise. I wanted to see a movie of it in the worst way. But I don't think they cared. (Note to budding filmmakers: It should still be made into a movie. The X-Files-philes would love it. )

I fixed Spring Creeks Mac computers a lot, which were networked with LocalTalk connections so they could share data, but heaven forbid they use e-mail... this was Hollywood, so everything was done by phone. They were always on the phone. Constantly on the phone. Schmoozing and setting up meetings and gabbing and having phone meetings and dialing dialing dialing.

But nothing ever seemed to happen there. Spring Creek, to my knowledge, only ever made two movies, one of which -- "Citizen Kohn" staring James Woods -- premiered on HBO the summer I was there so I got to see a premiere screening. The other was the airplane crash survivor movie "Fearless." Both films were finished long before that summer, and as far as I could tell, the NYC office didn't have anything to do with them. They had some deal with Paramount, so I also got to see a screening of "Bob Roberts" in the Paramount offices once. And I took Bonny to a screening of "Boomerang" with Eddie Murphy in some mid-town theater, but I think we had to leave early because the screening was so late, we were going to miss the last bus out of Manhattan.

By the end of August, I was starting to get truly depressed. Bonny had started to work in the Menlo Park Mall's Macy*s, so we no longer took the bus together. Worse, she was going to be transferred to Albany soon, and moving away from me completely. I'd been applying for jobs in NYC all summer (my highest low point: taking a typing test at Putnam Publishing on 5th Avenue and practically sweating all over the keyboard with nerves. Even then I could only think... who the hell uses a typewriter anymore?). Nothing was happening with my job search.

Then one day I saw an ad in the New York Times that said, in effect: "Do you like computers and words?"

I did. I liked both. Still a big fan. So I called. Turns out the ad was placed by a head hunter recruiting for a publisher. With nothing to lose, I went in.

Now, mind you, at this point in the summer, I'm a single guy working for free in the most expensive town in the world. My girl friend is gone -- she's not there to make sure I'm not slovenly. I have no washer and dryer. Still, I'm not a moron, so I wasn't dressed like a homeless person for the interview. But, clean clothes were still hard to come by for slave wages. So, I was wearing black pants and black shoes -- but I had on white socks. They were clean!

But this was all the recruiter could focus on. She wanted some stats on my background, but my god, I was wearing white socks with black pants and black shoes! Why would I do that?

She made some calls while I was there, as she seemed pleased with the mix of computer experience and writing knowledge I had coming out of school. She set up an interview for me for the next day with Ziff-Davis Publishing. I knew them! The published MacUser, my favorite computer mag! The recruiter thought the job might even be some new magazine that covered Macintosh! She sent me on my way -- and admonished me on the way out the door to wear black socks to the interview.

The next day I took time away from reading bad scripts to go to One Park Avenue for the interview. On the 4th floor, I sat in the human resources department and looked over the magazines they published: PC Magazine, PC Sources, a huge one called Computer Shopper that looked more like an encyclopedia than a magazine, and of course MacUser. I was giving some ZD propoganda all about the founder and CEO Bill Ziff and the history of the company (he got cancer, sold everything but the computer mags, cancer went into remission, and then computer magazines took off) and finally went in for the interview. I must have dazzled the woman in HR, because not long after, she sent me up to the 11th floor to have a meeting with Gus, the editor in chief of the magazine they were launching, which turned out to be covering Microsoft Windows.

Blah. Windows. That meant IBM PCs. I hated them. Difficult to use, ugly to look at, it was completely ridiculous that such products were the mainstream of computing. But I needed a job, so I said nothing about that. I went up to meet the EIC.

I sat in his office for 20 minutes, staring at his collection of magazines on his shelf, thinking, "should I pull one down and read it? Or is that rude?" I was pretty convinced Gus must be the busiest guy in the world when he finally showed up, looking a little surprised to see me. After a few minutes of chit chat, he sent me to the conference room where I met Karen, the senior editor that was looking to hire a couple of editorial assistants, of which I might be one.

Karen and I hit it off immediately. I'm not sure how we got from my work on the school newspaper to quoting Monty Python, but we did. I told her all about how I was wearing black socks and how important it was to the recruiter. She laughed, thinking that was a riot.

Then I left and went back to my internship. I was told to give HR a call on Monday to find out about the job. My Internship would be over on the day after that. If I didn't get the job, I'd have nothing. That weekend was one of worry and stress, as I picked apart in my mind ever second of the day, where I might have gone wrong, what I could possibly do to get the job now that I'd obviously managed to blow it, what a moron I was, I was completely unemployable and deserved to be pumping gas at the Sugar Creek in Hornell...

I went into the city as usual on Monday the 7th, and instead of using Spring Creek's phones, I called from a pay phone on 57th Street to ZD. I was on hold for a while and then finally heard the magic words: "The job is yours if you want it."

Just like that, I was employed! It may have been the greatest day of my life up to that point, at least work wise. I was going to be working at a national magazine, for the biggest computer magazine publisher in the world, making 20,000 dollars a year! (That last part didn't seem so great once I had to start paying a real rent a few months later when I moved closer to Albany).

I finished out my internship over the next couple of days. (I think I only talked to Paul from Spring Creek once after that... I think he moved on to Paramount when Spring Creek folded. A nice guy, too nice to be in that soul-sucking biz. I hope he's been successful, though.)

During the two days, I used the Macs in Spring Creek's office to whip up a fake New York Times article all about the "unemployable grad from Ithaca" who finally got a job. I matched up all the fonts from the Times as well I could, cut out a Times logo and photocopied a bunch of copies, and faxed and mailed them to all my friends. Such were the days before scanners.

I had a few days off before I started at ZD on September 14, and I actually spent two eight-hour days at my Mac IISi writing and writing. I wrote a short story that I even spent a few months trying to get published (for as much as I was happy to have a job, I still thought being a fiction writer was where I wanted to be... I got over it).

Looking back, I spent a lot of time those first couple years as a computer magazine editor bemoaning that I didn't follow my dream of working in comics (in 1994, I turned down a job offer from DC Comics, so I guess I got over that) and how much I missed my beloved dining hall from Ithaca College (turns out I only missed the people, and they didn't stay much longer after I left either -- good for them). But I also spent that time settling into not only something that was my job: it was the beginning of my career.

Embarrassment

Embarrassment

Josh sent me an instant message today saying "I love this sentiment: I guess Afghanistan's economy can't get any worse, so they probably didn't really care." "

I immediately took umbrage: "What a genius thing for someone to say. Like the people there had any vote in the matter."

Then Josh pointed out: "Of course it's genius! You wrote it."

"I did?"

Indeed I did, in the previous post to my blog. The moral of this story: Don't post to your blog in a lonely Sunday afternoon when news coverage has you depressed. Or if you do, at least try to remember what the hell you wrote.

Where is the Comedy?

Where is the Comedy?

I was planning to write a funny little bit for my blog this morning about how, because my wife is away from home this weekend, I've been leaving the seat up on the toilet, and twice now in a sleepy haze I've gone to sit on the loo and fallen in with a splash. (Is that irony? Or just stupid?)

Then I read some more things about the terrorist attack and felt the ability to be funny sucked right out of me. There's serious debate whether I even had that ability in the first place, so imagine the low levels of comedy in my body now.

I know in part its survivors guilt. I've had it before, when I've managed to get a job when other's I used to work with couldn't, and when I've managed to avoid being laid off when coworkers had to take the long walk to the door. The guilt felt so serious then, but I coped by throwing myself into work.

Surviving a terrorist attack that took place 300 miles from your doorstep and not being able to help -- not even being able to give blood! The Red Cross was too swamped this week for me to even get a person on the phone on where to go -- gives survivor guilt a new meaning. My mourning is somewhat tempered by the fact that I not only didn't lose anyone in the attack (that I know of), I don't think I even know any friends of friends lost in the attack. It gives me a detachment like I would have if this had taken place in the Middle East.

But it didn't take place there, so my detachment gives way to startling guilt that I'm okay, that I'm not helping, that I'm relatively helpless.

Worse, I continue on with my job search. I still need a job -- I still have to make sure my wife and I are okay in the long run. I even have my first job interview in two months tomorrow, Monday, and it looks very promising. But with that comes articles in today's paper suggesting that a global economic recession is imminent after the attacks. I guess Afghanistan's economy can't get any worse, so they probably didn't really care. Oh, and the Globe says the US is probably going to full-scale war against the Taliban government. Sucks for them.

Sucks for us, too.

Fall Preview Blues

Fall Preview Blues

This week should have been one of celebration. For on Tuesday in the mail, It arrived. Of course, before the mail came, I watched live as the World Trade Center's twin towers crumbled into dust, wrenching all chance of celebration out of the week.

The It the United States Postal Service had delivered was the Fall Preview TV Guide, the edition of this all important magazine that I usually refer to as my "Bible," much to my wife's disgust. For a television addict like myself, the weekly articles and program listings of the Guide are like a candy-bar to a diabetic in insulin shock (though, I'll be honest, the last 10 years are so the magazine isn't what it used to be... so, TV Guide, if you're reading this, hire me. Time to exorcise all those articles that have nothing to do with television. Movies I will tolerate to an extent, but fashion? C'mon.).

I've been hooked on the tube and reading the weekly Guide since I was first able to read and understand the icons they used for the TV stations. Two bits of strange, maybe sad, TV Guide-related trivia in my life:

(1) My parents used to call me the "walking TV Guide" when I was a kid because I could generally rattle off what was on the networks at every given hour of primetime. Thus they never panicked like I did when the Guide went missing behind the couch cushions.

(2) As a freshman in college, I seemed to wow my dorm-mates with a stupid game: they would name a television show of the 70s or 80s and I would name the day and hour of the programs seminal time slot.

"Mork & Mindy!" one guy would yell across the hall.

"Thursdays at 8. On ABC!" I'd shout back on my way to the shower in my flipflops.

Despite my love affair with the magazine through my lifetime -- my subscription only lapsed for a few months during college when I was not watching any television at all and didn't even have cable... a dark time I refuse to think about anymore -- I've never actively collected the magazine so I look back to previous issues. I've got too many comic books to start collecting weekly digest-sized magazines. But the Fall Preview issue was different-- I used to keep it on hand for weeks so I could evaluate the new shows with what felt like secret inside knowledge. After all, when Mom asked "Where have I seen that actress before?" I could rattle off her name and say, oh, she was on that show Duck Factory. The stars I could identify were always previously on a show no one in my family, let alone in the United States, ever saw, but it sounded great.

While I continue to look forward to the second week of September to get it, the advent of the Internet means the Fall Preview issue is redundant. I already knew what all the hot shows for the new fall season where long before the issue arrived. The terrorist attacks have pushed back the new season by a week, maybe more, and worse, some of the most promising shows of the season may be delayed even further because their plots deal heavily with fighting against terrorists (especially the show "24" which sounds like it will be an amazing program). I understand that no one wants to look as though they're profiting from the horror of this week. But that's like saying CBS was taking advantage of murder victims by letting "Murder, She Wrote" run for so long.

The news is certainly fascinating, but I need escapist entertainment more than ever right now, and if it can show me heroines and heroes taking care of the bad guys, all the better.

None of it's going to make me forget that passengers on the plane that went down in Pennsylvania are probably the biggest super-heroes I've ever heard of in my life.

I'm Rich!

I'm Rich!

My check for my 401K (from Access) that I cashed out arrived today. Over one thousand dollars of it was sucked out immediately by the government, quickly cancelling out the $600 tax "refund" check our beloved President Dumb-Ass managed to push through. Both of those checks, along with my latest unemployment check, are winging their way to my checking account as I speak. But, because my bank was recently the victim of a merger, who knows if all that money will end up where it's supposed to. Sigh.

Close to home

Close to home

My mom told me last night on the phone that my brother Paul, who is a member of the Allegheny County SWAT team as part of his job as a police officer in Alfred, NY, may be deployed with the rest of his team to NYC to help. Probably with crowd control or something, as the search of the rubble continues.

My cousin Michelle, who travels a lot for her job, was apparently going to NYC this week but her trip was cancelled. But all the news is not good, as her husband, Scott, apparently went into the hospital with chest pain and a numb hand/arm.

Erin, a woman I worked with back at WildWeb.com, is probably the one person I know in NYC that's unaccounted for, tho Josh says she was probably not in southern Manhattan. Of course, we don't know. Josh's father in law was actually in the Pentagon yesterday when the plane hit. FiL is fine.

The death toll in NYC is likely to be much larger than the entire population of Hornell, NY. Probably double.

What to do, what to do

What to do, what to do

So I'm sitting here in the basement in my office, but can't get started. I need to transcribe an interview I did two weeks ago for a story I should have had written over the weekend and should have handed in yesterday. But I hate transcribing from these low-quality mini-cassettes on a good day, and yesterday and today are not good days.

When thousands of people are dead in another country, from war or natural disaster or criminal stupidity, it's always so easy to say, "Aww, that sucks so bad," and then move on to watching a repeat of Friends or read another article about how many layoffs there are. Layoffs -- those were important. The economy -- that had an impact on my life.

Today, the economy seems so unimportant. My lack of a job, my freelance assignments, they all seem pretty needless in the cosmic scheme.

Of course, I can't take that attitude. All the newsletters this morning, the tv news, even Mayor Rudy Giuliani of NYC, all say the same thing: Go on with your normal lives. If you don't, the terrorists have won.

So, I'm going to transcribe this tape on this terrible day, and write this story, and play with my dogs, and go on with my life.

Terror

Terror

I remember being scared of the thought of being drafted when I was in college and Desert Storm was raging overseas. Even then, outside of having some serious conversations with my housemates over how we'd handle it (I believe my answer involved the word "Canada"), I never really believed it would happen.

In fact, I never really felt the U.S. would have a real, actual war again in my lifetime.

Christ, I'm stupid.

Tools of the Site

Tools of the Site

I don't know why, but I thought that people might like to know the various tools/service that run the Squished Frog Productions site. Probably not. But that's what back buttons are for.

The site is hosted by Your-Site.com, a Web host out of western Massachusetts. I found them just surfing around for a new Web host one day. They only charge $5 per month if you pay for the year in advance, and that gets you 50MB space and 25 POP3 e-mails. I've never seen any host do better price wise, and outside of the e-mail dropping out occasionally (they claimed their server reacts badly to multiple messages from eBay), I've never had a major problem with them.

My search is provided by that old stand by, Atomz, which has been letting sites set up free search forever. They do a great job. I've used others before, even Google, but Atomz is the most customizable, even for free. Last week I got my first search report, and guess what? No one has used the search expect me. Which is pretty much what I expected.

The rotating picture of me on the top of the page, which changes every day, rotates because of a JavaScript that takes care of such things. I stile it from Javascripts.com or some such site, I forget. I then had to modify the script's array so it would work for a month, not just a week. That involved changing one word and adding 24 items to the array. Web programmers know exactly what I'm talking about and are nodding their heads, thinking, 'of course, how simple.' I had to spend a half hour trying to find some documentation and then experimenting before I was even sure what I was doing. I'm not a programmer, folks.

Any programmer who had respect for me above will now lose it when I say that I build the majority of the non-blog related pages on SquishedFrog.com using Macromedia Dreamweaver 4. Sorry. But that software makes hand coding almost obsolete-- and the latest version has some decent hand-coding tools to boot.

That AOL Instant Messenger icon at the top of the page is from, duh, AOL. Click on it if you're an AIM user, and you can send me a message when I'm online, which is just about all the time during biz hours. I'd prefer to use Yahoo!Messenger, but no one I know seems to use it anymore.

The Squished Frog Store is from CafePress, one of the coolest sites I've seen in a long time. Now if only you people would buy messenger bags with my logo on them....

The silly-ass Guesbook is from SignMyGuestbook.com. I'd like to get rid of it. I wanted to setup using a program called dotcomments so everyone could leave comments about each post. But that requires making all the pages for my blog PHP based, which probably isn't a big deal, but I don't want to deal with it. Maybe when I set up a second blog. If I'm really bored this weekend while my wife is out of town killing waterfowl in the name of canine entertainment, maybe I'll just go for it. The other option would be to stop using Blogger for the Weblog and use a server software solution like Greymatter. If I'd found Greymatter first, I probably would have... but I'm too far in to switch now.

Unless someone out there knows a speedy way to switch from Blooger to Greymatter and wants to tell me. In fact, if anyone wants to suggest other tools I can use to improve things on the site, I'd love to hear it. Especially the comments thing...

Quotes

Quotes

A couple good lines I've heard in the last few days that everyone should hear.

"How come you're such a law-abider today?" -- Bonny, to me, as I kept my speed at 65 miles per hour during our Saturday trip on the Massachusetts Turnpike. It didn't last. I ended up doing 72 the majority of the drive.

"you can't trust companies these days anyway. fulltime gigs are really longer term freelance contracts with benefits." -- My friend Jim, as we discussed in instant messages the pros of telecommuting and wonder why more companies don't embrace the tactic.

Put your tongue between your teeth

Put your tongue between your teeth

My last name is Griffith. With a "TH" at the end. Those letters form the phonic consonant digraph that you make when you put your tongue between your teeth and blow gently, like a hiss with a lisp.

(One of my mom's favorite, frequently repeated stories: When I was a youngster having a problem pronouncing words that had the TH sound, she or my grandmother or someone gave me instructions: "Put your tongue between your teeth and say 'thunder.'" Later that day, I was found talking to my even younger neighbor, Virginia, who went by the name Ginny, and I was telling her: "Put your tongue between your teeth and say 'Ginny.'")

For some reason, no one seems to catch that TH on my name. I was recently on the phone with one of the many telephonic phone drones it seems inevitable for average citizens to avoid, trying to provide some information. She asked for my name.

"Griff-ith," I enunciated carefully. "Gee-are-aye, eff-eff, eye-tee-ach. First name is Eric, with a 'see'."

She moved on to some other info, but in a moment she was back to my name to confirm.

"So that was Eric Griffin--"

"Griff-iTH." I said. "With a tee-ach at the end."

"Right," she replied, and read back the complete spelling of my last name, complete with the TH at the end. And then said, "So, Mr. Griffin..."

I gave up. It's been a constant annoyance my entire life. I used to think it was just local to Hornell, NY, where I grew up. There were certainly more Griffin's in the phonebook than Griffith's, hell, one of my good friends from school had the last name Griffin. But to me, not noticing this difference in spelling was like calling a Smith "Smythe" or a Parker "Pecker."

Even at my high school graduation, the principal of my school called for "Eric C. Griffin" to come get his diploma. I was tempted for a split second to sit there and not move until he got it right, but I knew I was only shooting myself doing that -- the guy didn't know me, never would (the one time I got sent to the principal's office was by a slightly deranged substitute teacher, and when I go there the office secretary just had me sit until the end of the period then I went to my next class. I don't think I ever even talked to the man. As a fun aside, he was extremely bow-legged and used to wear yellow pants, so he looked like he was hobbling around on two very large bananas.)

But it's not a Hornell thing, nor even a western New York thing. I think people may be uncomfortable with the sibilant quality the TH produces and they default to the letter N because it's a nice, finite sound for ending a word.

That's my first theory. The other is that the majority of people are lazy, illiterate morons.

Greetings from Look Park

Greetings from Look Park

Yesterday was the first FPC Roundhouse Reunion Picnic. That makes it sound like an almost formal gathering, but it was far from it, as many folks were missing and it seems some didn't even know they were invited, which sucks.

Still, it was great to see so many of my friends (and their kids, most of whom seem to me ready to graduate college) from those days of yore in Northampton, still one of the greatest towns around. Bon and I walked up and down Main Street yesterday for a while, got a couple slices at the best pizza place on the planet (Pinocchio's) -- specialty slices are $3.10 each! -- and enjoyed seeing the bohemians on the march. There were protests against bombing in front of the courthouse (I wonder if those people think there's anyone in Noho that is really for bombing), the farmers market, and not a bra to be found anywhere. Not much had changed. Though it's so sad to see the former Words & Pictures Museum of Comics and Sequential Art turned into a Cingular Wireless store. (Words & Pictures lives on in cyberspace, though.)

The only thing that marred the day was the presence of hundreds of thousands of small biting bugs. Every time the wind picked up, a few would land on people as the bugs were blow out of the trees. The seemed to congregate mostly on dark clothing, but no one was immune after a while. This was the cosmic punishment Look Park places on people who book a picnic site late.

And Look Park -- what a scam that place is. I guess it's great if you have kids, but $3 to park, then you have to pay to get a picnic spot, and they actually do not allow people to do blanket picnics. I was told yesterday that you'll actually be yelled at if you're sitting in the grass on a blanket. Which might make sense if any of the grass was alive, but as of yesterday, the whole place was a praire of dead, burned brown blades desperate for a drink.

What am I looking at?

What am I looking at?

Books I'm currently reading: Brian Lumley's Necroscope, the first in his very long story of Harry Keogh (only a 12-year-old boy in this first novel) and his battle against the resurgence of vampires in the world. I picked up the first six books in the series at a library sale years ago, and I'm just getting to them. Lumley knows his way around description, but it seems like not much happens. It's sort of like a daytime soap opera. Lots of waiting. I'm concurrently reading Naked by David Sedaris, a collection of his essays/short stories -- it's impossible to tell where reality and fiction end and begin with Sedaris. I love hearing his stuff on NPR's "This American Life" and liked his latest book, Me Talk Pretty One Day, which I listened to on tape. I borrowed Naked from my friend Laura months ago (you see a pattern here on my reading habits?) but just started getting into it (the first story did nothing for me). Laura said that she had to be checked in on constantly because of the cackling noises she was making while laughing over his tales. I didn't think it was that good, at least not until last night, when I hit a passage that, had I been drinking milk, would surely have forced said milk to exit via my nostrils. I won't describe the passage in detail, only to say that it regards a mystery in his house as a child that involved the brown towels in the family bathroom and someone not using the proper wiping material.

Still to go this year: The last two books in the Harry Potter series. I need to re-read the Fellowship of the Ring before the Lord of the Rings movie is out. That's a lot of fantasy, but luckily there's also an new 87th Precinct novel out by Ed McBain called Money, Money, Money, and Greg Rucka should have a new book (Critical Space) out soon, too. And I really must read Chabon's The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay soon.

My birthday is a mere three months away, so if you want to buy my any of the above (I've got the Rings book) just skip over to my Amazon Wish List and have them sent directly to me. That's so sweet of you.

Minding Manors

I wasn't kidding when I said we put my grandmother's table in the corner of the living room. It's an antique marble top on a wooden stand with some of the most intricate design work I've ever seen. Grandma (Griffith, my dad's mom) isn't even sure how long it's been in the family, just that she got it from her parents, my great-grandfather and grandmother Sawyer (who both died when I was around 8 or 9).

Grandma's Table (click for larger image). Notice Siren's eyes are shut. Cute.

The table is in fantastic shape, but even more amazing are the two vases that came with it. Both were given as gifts to my great-great-grandmother when she was 15 years old -- she was already teaching school about this time. I think she died in 1895 at age 45, so that would make the vases -- both of which are in like new shape -- at least 136 years old. My great-grandpa Sawyer got them at age 9 (1895) and kept them until the 70's when they went to my grandmother's house in Canisteo, NY -- Home of the World Famous Living Sign!

To say that I'm nervous about having a 136-year-old hand-panted vase set in my house is an understatement. I wouldn't have even let Bonny take them out of the box if we didn't want to take the picture above for my grandmother to see (we e-mail pictures to my mom, she prints them out on her snazzy new HP ink-jet, and takes them to grandma). Now that the vases are out, and I have a feeling of impending doom. Some wayward tennis ball is going to bounce over there during fun time with the dogs or that I'll spill something on the marble top table, coaster be damned....

I have these items because my grandmother can't really have them any more. She's recently taken up permanent residency at a nursing home wing called McCauley Manor, in North Hornell, an addition built on to the MercyCare nursing home. Over the last few months, she's had problems with edema that caused her legs to swell so badly they were weeping fluids. Coupled with her emphysema (she smoked like all the cool chicks in the fifties and sixties), her blood oxygen level was dropping and dropping, so that she's now on permanent O₂. Without it, her pulse-ox would drop so low (say to around 50 -- anything under 90 is bad), she would probably be dead in days, if not hours. (Sorry if the medical stuff is not quite right. I'm not an MD, I just pretend to be one around injured people so I can see how much panic is caused by yelling, "We've got a bleeder!")

My parents and my uncle David tried to set up Grandma at home with in-house health care for a few hours each day after her first trip to the hospital back in June (during her stay, by the way, she put on eight pounds -- sorely needed after she spent the last few years dwindling down to 98 pounds on a diet of terrible tasting Meals on Wheels. This is not to disparage MoW, which is a great service, but Grandma always hated how they tasted and would offer them to visitors. I don't think she ever finished one.) She was home and able to attend my brother Paul's wedding on July 4.

One night in mid-July, alone at the house, now with a hospital bed in her living room, which she seldom if ever left except to eat and use the bathroom, she tried to close a curtain. She stumbled and fell.

Grandma hit her LifeLine button which sent an immediate call to the hospital emergency room at St. James, where my mom works running the LifeLine program, it so happens. LifeLine called her back, but when they got no answer, they called Canisteo ambulance to dispatch them to her house and then my parents, who probably made the 7-minute drive to Canisteo in 3 minutes. They got there fast enough to prevent the ambulance crew from busting down the door.

Inside, they found Grandma weakened, but in theory, none the worse for wear. However, they did test her blood oxygen level, and found it again dangerously low, even though she had a home O₂ system right there. She made another trip to the hospital, and within a couple of weeks, she started to feel better. Constant monitoring and some other breathing therapies were having the desired effect.

(Short aside here now to plead with anyone out there with an elderly or handicapped relative, get them LifeLine or an equivalent system immediately. It saves lives. It spreads peace of mind. Despite what many older folks think, it increases their independence. Depending upon the circumstances, they can cost next to nothing for a monthly fee for monitoring the unit which hooks to the phone and makes a call at the push of a button, or after a preset amount of time if the unit isn't reset, in case someone falls and can't get to a button. They help. Don't think your relative doesn't need one, that's like saying you don't need the fire extinguisher or band-aids. End of aside).

But, the truth was, obviously, Grandma couldn't ever be home again unsupervised. She needed 24 hour care. Thankfully, since my parents know people at the St. James Mercy Hospital system -- my mom is hitting 35 years of service there this month, she even went to school at St. James -- they were able to get a room pretty fast up at MercyCare.

She'll never go home again.

Maybe she doesn't miss it. She spent 13 years alone in that house since my grandpa John died.

(John -- for some reason my dad always called his father by his first name, even Dad doesn't remember why -- passed away one month before I graduated high school. There may be no sadder memory I have than my brother finding me on that day, May 24, 1988, before the home room bell rang and pulling me into one of the first floor bathrooms at Hornell High to telling me the news in private (I always left for school earlier than him). We cried on each other's shoulders until the bell rang, then went to our home rooms for attendance taking, and were called down to the office only a few minutes later so we could leave for the day.)

Perhaps the loneliness of the house versus the constant companionship she's got at McCauley Manor makes the latter better for her. She certainly seems to be doing great. I was up to see her four times in August while on my various trips home and while she's far from the strong-willed and gruff old lady I always loved, respected, and sometimes feared, she seems quite serene and content with her current lot, for which I'm thankful.

She's thankful too -- constantly praising my father for being there for her. She praises my uncle David for his calls and checking in (David, unfortunately, lives in Virginia).

She'll even praise my mother for her cooking and her help and more, even though they've never had the best of relationships. My grandmother once said in front of my mom, "Oh, I was always so disappointed Gerry didn't marry Kay," referring to a girl Dad dated while he was stationed in England with the Air Force in the early 60s. That was just the beginning of what went from a strained friendship to sometimes out and out hostility. But hey, that's in-laws for you.

All in all, I think Grandma is doing well. She's got a phone all her own, her own lazy-boy chair, her TV (with free cable!), she gets to talk to people all day if she wants, or nap, or whatever. If they weren't feeding her pills by trying to hide them in yogurt (she spit it out on the nurse, she told me with pride) and rolling her over when she's sleeping or making her wait 45 minutes before taking her into the bathroom, maybe it would seem like home.

Now the Griffith family is divvying up her household belongings. Grandma had been parsing things out to people for years, one time taking a stack of post-it notes and having people put there names on things. When Dad told her during one visit last month that I was taking the marble top table, time stopped for a moment as a look of scorn crossed her face. It was hurting her to hear that, I knew, and I told her I certainly didn't have to take it then. She said "I always intended for you to have that table, Eric. I just didn't know if I intended for you to have it now."

Lord I didn't even want to touch the table when she said that. Yet, by the time I left that day, she was insisting I take it. Giving me care instructions. Telling me not to put it in direct sunlight and don't put drinks on it and to make sure Bonny got the vases and that they were kept safe safe safe. Her memory is slipping a bit, as by the end of the visit, I think she may have thought it was her idea I take the table that day.

Soon my cousin will be coming north for a dresser, my brother will take the antique umbrella stand, my parents will take the end table, etc. I'm happy to report that Grandma's piano (she taught herself piano and violin, I think in her 50s) will go to McCauley Manor for her to play.

The only thing I wanted was the Burpee Seeds clock they'd had hanging in the living room all my life (I got it. It's in the picture). Now we've got items that actually cry out for a sit down with someone from Antique's Roadshow. And it makes me thrilled to be entrusted, and sad that they had to be anywhere but her house, and scared to holy hell I'll bust something all at the same time.

Various Crap

Various Crap

There's something quite unnerving about calling your mom on the evening of her birthday to wish her a happy, and you find out she's reading your online journal when she says to you, "So, I wanna hear more about this first kiss!"

"Uh, uh, uh... it's all there in the blog," I blurted.

"You never told us about that!" she continued.

"So, Bonny and I got that table we got from grandma situated over in the corner of our living room..." I started to blather to get the subject changed, and it worked. Whew.

You run a risk with any honesty in a blog that someone might actually read it.

Or worse, the risk that someone involved in your past transgressions might read it. What if the girl from the first kiss actually read that I thought she was a tramp even at age twelve? Good thing I can't remember her name, thus she's not likely to stumble across the story on my blog. Then again, if she ever did how would she know it was her I was writing about? She was such a tramp after all, she's probably mentioned in hundreds of blogs... (bada-BING).

---

My former Access shipmates once talked of us all doing a short story about unemployment and trying to get them published, and the topic has come up again. Getting it published is probably a bit optimistic, but one former inmate, our beloved Tom Stanton wrote one already (curse his work ethic). So now I want to write one, I'm just hard up for ideas. Amazing how I can yammer on about nonsense all day long in this blog but when it comes to crafting some prose that could actually mean something, I'm as dry as rhinoceros skin on a hot day in Vegas. (But who's better at mixed metaphors, huh? Huh??)

That brings up another writing thought: my mom thinks I should write a book in the style of my blog (it's true, she even posted it to my guestbook). Which is sweet as hell to say, at least she's entertained, but I tried to explain to her, there's probably lots of people out there funnier than me who'd like such a chance and couldn't get it.

Then again, what do I have to lose? Time? I got plenty of that and I'm wasting it daily writing for free, so why not take a chance. Thoughts?

---

Yesterday we bought a home security system. The price is right: free installation and only 30 bucks a month monitoring. Though of course our free install turned into 70 bucks once we upgraded the motion detector so the dogs won't set it off and paid for the taxes and license fees, etc. Still, it's something we've talked about doing for a long time, since we both are working here, we've got all sorts of equipment here, etc. So potential burglars be aware: Not only do you now have to content with Caper bonking you in the crotch as he tries desperately to welcome you to our home, but you'll also set off an alarm when you try to nonchalantly take my VCR.

I drive her craaa-zeee

I drive her craaa-zeee

I think my wife, Bonny, took a little umbrage at my entry about things she does that drive me crazy. And who can blame her? No one likes to know that they're not making their spouse one hundred percent happy. That's why we have spouses: so they'll devote their lives to making sure we are contented, fulfilled, and so we'll have someone to change our bedpans in our later years. I'm thinking of getting a bedpan soon, just so she can practice.

To make it up to her, it's only fair that I list all the things that I do that make her crazy but that I know she'll miss about me when I'm someday hit by a bus. I asked her what they might be, and this is what she told me. Of course, her statements are all nonsense and my rebuttals follow.

1. I leave crumbs on the counter after I make toast or a sandwich. (Duh. That's what counters are for. Does she want me buttering my toast on the floor?)
   
2. I don't get more food out to feed the dogs after I've used up what's available. (I can't even keep track of what the dogs eat anymore. When they wake me at 5:30 to feed them, I always ask Bon first what's on their menu for the morning.)
   
3. I make multiple piles of laundry on the floor instead of one neat pile of dirty clothes. (How else am I supposed to tell my "very dirty" clothes from my "not as dirty and thus still wearable clothes"?)
   
4. I always have a cluttered office and I seem to like to live that way, but she doesn't care because it's in the basement. (No rebuttal. It's true.)
   

Other stuff I do that makes her nutz (with a "Z"), yet makes me ever the more endearing, but she was too polite to point it out:

1. Whenever she's cooking, I start talking all cornpone and call her Mammie Georgia, as in, "Was viddles is Mammie Georgia cookin' up fo' me tonight?"
   
2. I haven't done this in a while, but I used to like dropping a bucket of cold water on her while she was in the shower. Ah, memories.
   
3. I complain about being made to drive all the time -- Bon likes to be chauffeured -- but when she does eventually get behind the wheel, I then complain about her driving.
   
4. I weep openly when watching any of the romantic scenes between Kirk and alien chicks on the classic Star Trek.
   
5. When I weed, I usually pull out flowers. They all look like weeds to me. Sorry, I nevered developed an appreciation for plants outside of that whole 'providing all my oxygen' thing.
   
6. My constant references to how she's "as nimble as a porn star" and my weekly request: "Oh, wouldn't you like to dress up like Britney for just one night?"
   
7. Whenever a song comes on the radio be either the Beatles, the Monkees, or the Rolling Stones, I start to quiz her on who sings the tune. She's steadily gotten better at this over the last decade, so it's not as much fun anymore. Now she quizzes me on 80's hard rock ("Who sang this: Quiet Riot, Whitesnake, or Twisted Sister?")
   
8. When we're at the mall, I like to grab things of the shelf at CVS and put them in her purse when she's not looking, then run to the front of the store yelling "Shoplifter! I saw it! It's the short chick, she's got the bulk container of Altoids in her bag!"
   

Obviously, some of the above are fictional. Do you really think I'd pull flowers? That's just mean.

You say it's your birthday?

Happy Birthday, Mom! A true baby-boomer of 1945, these days we simply consider her the accident and surgery prone type. Mom's had a bit of neck/back surgery this year (stop sleeping on the couch during ER!), plus tried to cut her pinky finger off on a band saw -- but she didn't lose the finger! It just looks very Frankenstein-esque now. But at least it took her mind off her neck pain.

My brother, officer Paul, is right behind her for surgery/injuries. He recently had a life-long (unbeknownst to him) deviated septum fixed -- and his tales of having bloody mucus and stitches literally vacuumed from his sinuses are both horrific and hysterical to hear -- and also just had minor surgery on his finger to have a thorn removed that had been embedded inside for at least two weeks.

I live in constant fear of inheriting the medical karma of either of them.

Also, happy anniversary to me: three months unemployed! If I can make it another month without getting a full-time job, I'll have equaled the amount of time I was unemployed directly after I graduated from college. (Try not to keep your fingers crossed on that one.) That was the economy at the worst I can remember it prior to today -- even Massachusetts citizens on the doll for unemployment just started to equal the levels they were at back in September of 1992, when I landed the job that launched my career.

Drives Me Crazy

Drives Me Crazy

When we were driving home from our last trip out to see our parents, Bonny and I made a list. We always make lists on long car rides. Since I drive 85% of the time, I'm usually the one who shouts our rallying cry ("Let's make a list!") and Bon grumbles while she looks through her purse for paper and a pen (which I've usually lost).

During our last trip, we started thinking about things to get people for Christmas this year (assuming I have a job... if I don't, everyone gets IOUs in their stocking, just like my brother got for his wedding) and then moved on to topics I should write about in my blog. No mere online diary, this Web journal is meant to captivate you with pithy prose on all sorts of topics that might interest me, especially if they have to do with the fact that I can't buy a job in this economy.

"Why don't you write about how your wife is suffering while you're at home unemployed," my cherubic spouse suggested? She was writing it down on the pad before I even responded.

So, I've sat here for about an hour trying to think of some way in which she's suffered, some horrible transgressions that have been made. Outside of my occasionally yelling upstairs to her when she's on the phone with a client (usually with important queries like "Where the hell are my sneakers?" or newsflashes such as, "Hey, Caper just did his business in the front yard!"), I can't recall any times my wife has unduly suffered from my 24/7 presence over the last three months.

In fact, I would argue, that's Bon has benefited from my homebody state. Now the dishes get done at two o'clock in the afternoon -- no more waiting for me to get to them when I get home at six. The lawn is mowed in the middle of the day. When I go out to get the mail, weeding the berm along the sidewalk sometimes distracts me for up to an hour. She can have me come upstairs to fix some (inevitable) Windows Millennium Edition problem at any time instead of telling me about it on the phone while I sit in my office at work nodding my head, thinking "I wonder if Linda Wertheimer on NPR really looks like my grandmother like I picture in my head?" or "Should I have a Shanghai chicken wrap for lunch? Or Salad? Wrap, I think. No, salad. Well, maybe a wrap and a salad...."

I miss the days of important corporate decision-making.

So, instead of writing of Bon's suffering, I decided, much to the detriment of my marriage, to present to you the top things my wife does that makes me crazy, even though I fully admit I would miss these things about her if she weren't here to make my life complete:

1. She only puts butter on her pancakes -- no syrup.
   
2. She won't put butter on her corn on the cob -- she eats it plain! Hell, why not eat it raw??
   
3. When a cooking mess is made, she starts to clean up immediately -- what if I have more mess left to make? That's doubling the effort.
   
4. She steals blankets.
   
5. She won't set her own alarm clock when she needs to get up. I have to set mine, so we can both share in the torture of her getting up to leave for a dog agility trial at 4:30am.
   
6. She complains when I leave the toilet seat up. I mean, what's up with that? I know I'm better about it than most guys. I've even trained myself to go sitting down most of the time. Is it my fault the couple of times I've forgotten are the times when she gets up at 2am to go and splashes in to the cold water?
   
7. She can memorize the lyrics of just about any song by listening to it once.
   

Another dead appliance

Another dead appliance

I almost wrote about the Sony eVilla Internet Appliance for Playboy.com (look for review of the Xanboo home managment system coming soon to that site's Gear section), but I guess it's a good thing I didn't, since it's now dead. I'm sure that would have some sort of impact on it getting published.

Pretty Boy

Pretty Boy

If you're wondering, the picture at the top right of the blog is moi. There's a new shot everyday, rotating in, one for each day of the month. Apparently I have enough ego left to want to do such a thing. Some shots even include state-of-the-art special effects, yet none of them make me look thinner.

New Stuff!

New Stuff!

There are new items you should buy at the Squished Frog Store including a woman's t-shirt (sexy!), a long-sleeved t-shirt (manly!), and the obligatory mousepad (geeky, yet it keeps shmutz off the mouse ball). Buy them now. Prices are so low, I'm practically giving them away, if you don't count the hefty percentage that goes to the store host.

Hmmmm.... waxy......

Hmmmm.... waxy......

One of the questions Bonny and I frequently ask ourselves is "What's up with Caper?"

Caper, our little yellow Labrador is a magnet for weird bruises and contusions and gunk in his ears. The reasons are various, sometimes obvious, sometimes not. For instance, this week, his latest weirdness was probably from eating potpourri.

You see, Bon's got this gigantic bowl filled with potpourri-ed dry fruit and leaves, bizarre wax-encrusted cookies tied together in plaid ribbon, and a bunch of Styrofoam balls wrapped in the same. She keeps the bowl on our dining room table as, I dunno, garnish, because it's pretty damn useless. Whenever someone comes over, the bowl has to be moved as most meet and greets at our house require the dining room table. I'm the only one who ever sees it, yet it's been there so long I never really see it anymore, it's invisible to me.

The problem with removing the bowl from the table is, we've got nowhere else to put it. The bowl is too big to fit on a shelf. A couple months back, Bon was out of town with Caper while I stayed home with Siren and Annie, the yellow Lab owned by our friend Jean (I was babysitting). I needed to spread out some stuff on the dining room table to work and I stood in the dining room looking around for probably a full thirty seconds holding that bowl, trying to decide where to put it. I finally set it on the floor. Seems like a good place at the time. I didn’t finish with all my stuff on the table that night, so I left it. And I forgot all about the bowl.

The next morning, I come down stairs and there's Siren gingerly picking the Styrofoam balls out of the bowl and gently placing them on the floor. Why? So she could get down into eating the non-edible wax-encrusted cookies! I have no idea how many she ate, or how many Annie ate. Neither of them got sick, luckily. But I put the damn bowl back up on the table and avoided telling Bonny about it for around a week so as to negate my punishment. It's like telling your parents when you've turned 26 that you had a speeding ticket when you were 17... the more time that passes in between a lie of omission, the less fall out there should be. That's my story and I'm sticking with it. (By the way, that speeding ticket and not telling really happened to me, but my parents knew the whole time because it showed up on their insurance papers. Tricky bastards.)

When I finally did tell Bonny about the wax encrusted cookies missing from her potpourri bowl, and after tearing me a new orifice with which to defecate, she did what some might consider insane: she put more wax encrusted cookies in the bowl-o'-garnish. He thinking, of course, was that it would never happen again. (My thinking, of course, was "Where the hell is she storing extra wax encrusted cookies in this house?")

Her thinking was wrong.

On Thursday, Bon had someone stop by so they could go over schedules for the agility trial her club ARFF. (Agility is Really Fun for Fido -- No, that's really the name) is putting on this weekend. Knowing they needed to spread out on the table, I took the bowl off for them and placed it on the coffee table in the living room. After finished after a couple of hours, then Bon and I decided to go shopping for a while in the afternoon.

When we got home, I was the first to stumble upon the decimated bowl contents when I got home, and let out a wail (more for me than for the dogs). Styrofoam balls where everywhere, potpourri resembling tree bark littered the floor, and yep, the wax-encrusted cookies (which smelled vaguely like molasses) were all gone. Bon was angered. I was personally relieved, as I think that might have been the last of her wax encrusted cookie reserves and now we could move on. She'll probably find more on eBay.

So, finally, to the part about "What's up with Caper?": A couple hours after we found the bowl sans cookies, we were both sitting in Bon's office, talking about something, and Caper was in his usual spot, perched in the blue lazy chair in the corner. With no warning, he let out a yelp, rocketed off the chair and did a major loop around the room, looking backwards at his own ass the entire time. He finally stopped and looked up at us with a look saying, "A little Help?" I figured he'd got a bug bite on his bum, but we could find no evidence of such when we rolled him over.

About four hours later, I lay on the living room couch watching Friends (thank god they're going into their last season) and Caper was in his usual spot, perched on the brown reclining chair in the corner (sensing a pattern?). Just as suddenly, but without the warning screech this time, Caper flew off the chair looking at his rear end as if it had turned on him again, and this time did a sharp u-turn into my lap on the couch. Luckily, with two Labradors, I've taken to protecting my privates whenever there's unexpected motion, and good thing here, or I'd be a soprano, and not like the kind on HBO.

Still, it was heart-warming to know that Caper thinks I could protect him from his own anus. It would have brought a tear to my eye if I hadn't been laughing. Another thorough rollover and check and we still couldn't find anything. We assume the wax-encrusted cookies were taking their toll on his colon. Bon even went out with a flashlight to watch him poop that night. We're full service dog guardians, we are.

Moral of the story: Keep your potpourri out of reach of the husband.

No ouchies

Anyone who wanted to take a free poke at me and maybe bust my nose or give me a concussion, sorry -- my medical benefits ran out last night at midnight. I am now not allowed to get sick, injured, bruised, concussed, or infected until I've got a new job.