I'm not surprised -- I'd always suspect this...

Back in 1989, my friend (and original Squished Frog Productions member) Brett got me a star for Christmas. That is, he got the International Star Registry to "redesignate star number MONOCEROS RA 6h 44m 2.18sd -4° 34' 3.74" to the name Eric Griffith."

The certificate that came with the star map (showing my personalized ball of flaming galactic hydrogen with a little tiny red circle around it) went on to say "Know ye further that this star will henceforth be known by this name * This name is permanently filed in The Registry's vault in * Switzerland and recorded in a book which will be registered in the copyright office of the * United States of America*" (I don't know why they throw in the asterisks... must be a star thing.)

Now, Wired News has a story about how this company (in Illinois, by the way) doesn't carry much weight... star renaming by them is "not recognized by any professional astronomical organization."

So much for the Enterprise ever visiting planet Eric Griffith IV in search of intelligent life.

It's so frickin' cold in my basement office today that my fingers are feeling numb. Time to break out the space heater. I held off as long as I could. But I can't take it anymore.

By the way, people from Hornell, they call it "pop," but "soda" sometimes works, too. I've never worked anywhere in my life were we didn't eventually have the "do you call it soda or pop?" conversation.

Burn, Baby, Burn

My memories of kitchen "nightmares" revolve around my dad. When I was a kid, my mom worked nights as a nurse in the local ICU; on those nights Dad was in charge of my younger brother and me. As we like to point out to mom these days, that mean meals usually consisted of either fish sticks or baked French fries.

However, sometimes Dad would get adventurous. Like the time we were doing the standard Wesson Oil in the frying pan job on the fried chicken and the whole pan went up in flames. I was ready to throw water on it even at age eight, but Dad luckily was smart enough to put the cover on the pan and smother it instead.

The best time was when Dad was cooking up steaks for us on the broiler in the oven. Steak=good. We were ready to sit down in front of the TV for reruns of Star Trek and a plate of dead cow when Dad checked and realized we didn't have any Coke. (The soda pop, not the nose candy. Back then, my dad drank Coca-cola and nothing but Coca-cola. His addiction was so major that the only time I ever heard my grandfather (Dad's dad) come close to swearing was when he said something about my dad drinking "all that damn Coke!")

So we had to run to the convenience store to get a couple of two-liter bottles. And he had to take my brother and me because we were too young to leave home alone.

Dad drove us to the Sugar Creek store about three blocks away in his pickup truck, grabbed the bottles, and we split for home. One block of this travel put us on the 4-lane highway that runs the length of the town of Hornell and it was on this stretch, only ½ a block from home, that my dad's pickup ran out of gas.

We hoofed it back to the Sugar Creek, bought a can of gasoline, filled it up, and then walked back to the truck. We climbed back into the vehicle and got home...

To find it filled with smoke. Dad hadn't turned off the broiler and the steaks were nothing but charred bricks.

How we cleared the house of smoke I don't recall – I assume we put a box fan in the window – and how we kept it from Mom for as long as we did is an even bigger mystery. It ranks right up there with the best memories of my childhood, even though it could have lead to my house burning down.

For some reason I was reminded today of the point in my life whenI knew I was an adult. Knowing it was one of those crystal clear realizations, like knowing you've said the wrong thing or knowing you've got to pee even though you drove by the rest stop a mile ago.

My realization took place in my car, as I was driving toward Albany one day in the winter of 1993 to visit my girl-friend at the time, who I ended up asking to marry me later that year, though that had nothing to do with realizing I was an adult.

I was driving along, and I was thinking about the house I'd always wanted. I thought about this house a lot in those days. I wanted to build myself a house, but not just some standard ol' normal house. My house was going to be high-tech, with sliding doors like on Star Trek and fire poles for easy access to the downstairs and the television would be a giant projection system that was built into the wall and every bathtub would have jacuzzi jets and the shower would have multiple shower heads and it would all be voice activated or turned on by motion detectors....

Then a stray thought entered my mind: "Wow, the electrical bill on such a place would be huge..."

And that's when I knew I was an adult.

Read the terrifying tale of Joe's encounter with his mortal nemesis over at Facts Are Meaningless...

So while at the in-laws, I broke the dogs' ChuckIT. It was frozen from being left outside so the gross, yuck filled tennis ball it throws wouldn't get on anything in the house, and it slipped out of my hand and the frozen plastic shattered like glass. Got a new one at PetCo today here in Jersey, while out doing some errands with Joe. While we were waiting at the checkout, a small snake got out of a cage near the checkout aisle, and a little girl in line behind us starting yammering "I don't like snakes, I don't like snakes, I don't like SNAKES!" Some passerby picked it up and handed it to a checkout girl, who had to hold it while scanning people's stuff into the register.

Time for the Friday Five...

1. What was your biggest accomplishment this year? Actually enjoying some of my unemployment time. Not all of it, but some.

2. What was your biggest disappointment? Not completing more than a couple chapter's of my novel for National Novel Writers Month.

3. Will you be making any New Year's resolutions? Much like in 1998, I think it'll be all about the weight. That year, I lost 25 pounds, but I've put it all back and then some since the end of 1998 -- which was the first year I got laid off at a job. Food=comfort.

4. Where do you wish you were celebrating? Celebrating New Year's? I don't know. I'm generally only at home and that's fine. One year Bon and I did go down to Connecticut and hang out with our friends Laura and Deb, and that was fun. But as often as not, I'll go to bed early.

Of course, if I could be anywhere, I'd want it to be WARM.

5. What do you plan to do for New Year's Eve? See above. I think I'll be spending that day setting up my new Dolby 5.1 sound system and maybe test it out with a viewing of the Simpson's Season One DVD.

Griffith-Style Giving

Bon and I made the trek to Hornell this year, and even needed the rooftop car carrier to get all of the stuff we’d purchased home. We don’t need it on the way back, however, because my family got our Ford Explorer an under-the-car hitch on to which we can mount a behind-the-car carrier. Cool.

Other cool swag:

Time for the Friday Five...

1. What is the weirdest thing you've ever eaten? I once had bear at a the Delaney House outside of Northampton, MA.

2. Name one (material) thing you can't live without. Television. And Oreos.

3. Name something you've always wanted to do but didn't have time for. Write a novel... well, okay, I've had time. I'm such a loser...let's face it, I've had time to anything I've ever wanted. Just not the gumption.

4. What outrageous thing do you wish you had the nerve to do? Sky dive. Seriously.

5. How do you plan to spend your weekend? Time for travel! We'll drive to Bonny's parent's house in Greene NY tomorrow, then Sunday on to my parents in Hornell, and Sunday we'll open gifts with my Mom's side of the family. Then Monday night we do gifts with my family, which is usually a four or five hour affair. Christmas day it's back to Greene for more presents and food.

Okay, so it's looking more and more like the problems I'm having getting my blog to load, and the intermittent problems with e-mail, are all because of our ISP (we use RCN). This isn't the first time they've caused us grief and then magically worked again a couple days later, but I'm getting sick of waiting for the "couple days later" to arrive. That overpriced DSL is looking better and better.

Tho, now, of course, I'm even more hesitant because the Comcast take over of AT&T Broadband means they're taking over my town, and might actually put cable modems in where Cablevision (the previous owners) and AT&T have failed to, even tho I know the town has been wired to support them. But I can't take much more of this bad connection to my own crap...

My buddy Josh sent me an Xmas card, which was nice, but what was really great is that in it he put a MadLib about "A Visit to Santa at the North Pole." I thought you might want to see it.

Last night I got a little obsessed about how slow my Blog page is loading and started tinkering. I think I found one HTML error in my blogger.com template and fixed that, then I pulled the headshot graphic because I was worried that the code for changing it each day was causing the page to load way to slow. I think it's STILL too slow, and now I'm starting to think it's my web host's fault, so they're getting a tech support note from me later.

Vikki came by today and left her golden puppy, Casey, with us for a few hours while she was at a meeting in Boston. I was happily reminded about all the great things about my own dog's puppyhoods -- the breath that smells faintly of skunk, the soft fur, insane FRAPping (Frenetic Random Activity Periods, exemplified by running around in circles for no discernable reason), and peeing on the floor. Plus, Casey likes to cuddle and get hugs even at 4 months. It was so nice.

I am always eager to impart more information about myself to you, my audience, because, well, despite having all of my ego crushed out of me over the last few years by micro-managers and badly run corporations and the economy, I still think I'm just damned fascinating. So, I just found out about this little thing called the Friday Five, which are five questions posted each Friday at s m a t t e r i n g.com that require me to reveal just a bit more about myself than I'm able to think of all alone. So here's last Friday's questions, and maybe I'll even remember to do this every Friday. Or maybe I won't. It's not like there will be a quiz later. Though if there was, man, you'd be all set.

1. What did you want to be when you grew up? First I wanted to be a photographer, because that's what Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man, was doing for a day job. Then I figured reporter, because I didn't have a camera. Then I just wanted to be a writer. I still do. Just not the kind of writer I turned out to be.
   
2. Do you have any nicknames? I like when I'm called Griff. My wife calls me Honey, or sometimes Idiot. I've been called worse.
   
3. If you could change something about yourself what would it be? My constant craving for chocolate. I wish I could just replace it with something, like when I replaced drinking all caffeinated soda with just Sprite, and later Diet Sprite. Switching to Diet Sprite will always been the crowning achievement of my life when it comes to ingesting foodstuffs.
   I'd also make it easier on myself when buying footwear.
   
4. Have you ever bought anything from an infomercial? Yes. I bought one of those ab-cruncher things and used it religiously for an entire week. Last time I moved, it went to the Salvation Army.
   
5. How do you plan to spend your weekend? This coming weekend I'll spend most of it on the road getting to central New York for the various family X-mas celebrations.
   

Bonny and I seldom get anything big for each other for Xmas or birthdays. This year, we got each other some slippers. And I just ordered her a book with tales of vampire slayers of the past (out of the Buffy/Angel milieu). But she always starts whining, such as today's conversation that started with: "Are we lame?"

I said, "I'm getting around just fine. No bruising at all from where you kicked me."

"No," she replied with the irritation that I'm so fond of generating, "are we lame for not getting each other anything for Christmas?"

"Well, lets see... my dad bought my mom a [blank], and Paul bought Jen a big ol' [blank], and yeah, they do lots of buying. But we don't. Does it matter?"

"I feel guilty we don't exchange gifts, though."

"Even when we do," I reminded her, "we seldom wait until the holiday or birthday. You always give me stuff a week or two early because you get too excited to wait."

"Yeah," she said. "Still, I feel lame."

"Okay," I said, "next year, that's it, we do it: we go nuts, we buy each other some nice stuff and we put it under the tree and we wait. Sky's the limit."

"Wait, no limit? No spending limit?"

"Hell no! You're a Griffith now! Think like one! Spend all you've got and then spend more!" (That's how my parents do it. It's a concept I embrace.)

"No way," she said.

"Fine. No gifts then."

But next year, I'm going to buy her a cottage on a lake with a dock for the dogs to jump off of and a cable modem and a view of the west so we can watch the sunset every night. We'll spend summers there and maybe someday call it home.

(Now she HAS to get me a big present next year...)

Tomorrow I get to baby sit my friend Vikki's Golden Retriever puppy, Casey. I'm psyched. I like puppies.

Okay, not so fast on that DSL order there, Chester. Lots of little pot holes to overcome in the contract they sent. I've e-mailed the providers (myDSL/Intercom Online) out of lower Manhattan to see if they can answer my questions. On the up side-- they are on Wall Street and supposedly only had 4 hours of downtime after 9/11... that's pretty damn amazing. Now if we can bring ourselves to part with $149 a month-- yeah, that's right, per month for 256K connection, and that makes us almost giddy -- maybe we'll be in business.

We might be able to get a broadband connection again! It's still over priced, and still not very fast (256K up and down), but it's DSL and would mean I could test routers and no more modems and it would be worth it. Here's hoping....

An interesting note from Neil Gaiman (not that he sent it to me, since he doesn't know me from his elbow... he wrote it in his Blog on Dec. 9. But I did have dinner with him once. Well, we were at the same table while eating after he did a reading for the CBLDF. And he did shake my hand. He's a nice chap.).... He says blogging only makes sense when he writes directly into the blog-interface at Blogger.com. If he wrote stuff for his blog in the word processor, it would take on new importance and meaning to him, and become more like work than fun.

Yet, I write almost all of my blog entries in Microsoft Word 2002 then cut and paste them into Blogger. Even then, my wife gives me shit about typos and missstakes and how my grammer is ungood.

Where's the even ground? Being more careful in a text editor? That, too, sounds like work.

Over at Kyouki’s Weblog, we’ve been asked what we REALLY want for the holidays (in my case the holiday is Christmas, even though I’m not a Christian. I am, however, a white-bread Caucasian, which is almost the same thing, only without the church-ifyin’. But anyone who wants to get me stuff for Kwanza and Chanukah, feel free.)

What I want most of all is a new desk chair. I have a home office where I work, and I spend 50 plus hours a week in the same chair in front of the computer, and my current chair seems to be at war with my ass. By the time 3pm rolls around most days, my glutes are screaming at me to find a better surface for them, something with more give and take. Even a toilet ring is more comfortable.

If I could have ANYTHING I wanted tho? That’s a whole other story. I’d like to be running my own consumer tech magazine. We’d have offices in a nice building just outside of Boston (closer than Needham), preferably some cool-ass old mill building converted for new businesses. We’d have a game room/cafeteria and I’d have a cool corner office and I’d hold lots of meetings that would be more social than work oriented, because I would have surrounded myself by the best of the best: I’d have to hired every person I’ve ever enjoyed working with who I think is smart. The company would be privately held, no stock market crap, and funded by someone with deep pockets and no worries about getting a return on their investment. Oh, and we’d allow dogs in the office.

In other words, I’d like the 1990’s again.

Now, I guess if I really want something I could actually have if money were no object:

SPOILER WARNING: Do NOT read this post if you have not seen the film Vanilla Sky or are at all interested. I fully intend to give away the ending here. You have been warned.

One of the first bits o’ fiction I remember writing was in my 10th grade English class for Miss Ciangalini. It was a bit of horror/thriller about two friends surviving horrors in a cave, but in the end, it turned out to all be a dream… or was it? In her comments on the story, Josie (later I got to know her and call her by her first name) said: “To end a story and have it all be a dream is a cheat.”

And she was right. To build up characters or situations and have it all turn out to have not been “real” in the end just makes the time and emotional investment made by the reader of viewer seem like a waste. There’s a reason that Bobby coming out of the shower on Dallas is still considered one of the low-points in television history.

That’s not to say you can’t have a story turn out to be a dream and still have the story work. And Vanilla Sky, which turns out to be completely the “living dream" of the lead character, almost works. There’s 20 minutes of exposition at the end to make sure we know that it's a dream, where 5 minutes would do, but for the most part, it works, and makes sense, and you don’t feel completely cheated.

But you will not like it. I say this as an amateur psychologist studying the viewing habits of American movie goers. And I predict while it may open strong, there will be a backlash against the film. The reason why? The marketers, even though they couldn't help it.

Not once in the ad campaign for the film is the potential audience told that this film has a science fiction aspect to it. It’s not an aspect that comes into the film early, but it impacts everything about what you’re going to see. Everything. People don’t like to feel that they’ve been “tricked” into seeing a sci-fi film when they’re expecting an “erotic thriller.”

This same thing happened with the M. Night Shyamalan's amazing film “Unbreakable.” The director had a lot to live up to if he was going to equal the twists and turns of “The Sixth Sense,” and in that respect he does: the twist ending is a zinger. But where Unbreakable went wrong was again the marketing. People went expecting a horror film like The Sixth Sense, and while it had some aspects of that, what Unbreakable is from top to bottom is the origin story of a super-hero. And the audience didn’t go in knowing that. When they found out, they came out feeling they’d been tricked. Unbreakable opened strong and then faded out quickly.

So how do you reveal Vanilla Sky is a sci-fi film without ruining the ending? How do you tell people Unbreakable is really about a meta-human super-dude without giving away the ending? To be honest, you can’t. Thus, when the audience starts to feel cheated, they don’t spread good word of mouth. So, both films were probably doomed from the start.

If people didn’t have to pay $8.50 plus per person for one movie, this probably wouldn’t be such a big deal. But going to a movie is a big investment these days, not something to take lightly when you can pay $40-45 bucks just for two people to go to a movie and have some snacks. They don’t want to feel tricked on top of that.

I know many people with mortal enemies. Joe,for example, is the mortal enemy of dust. My wife, Bonny, is the mortal enemy of pictures that don’t hang straight. I am the mortal enemy of snow. Snow is the Lex to my Clark, the Leno to my Letterman, the Bluto to my Popeye.

There was a time when I could sit back and sort of enjoy the first snow fall of the season, take pictures of its pristine whiteness as it weighed heavily on the tree branches, enjoy the muffled sound of children up the street pulling out sleds, the sight of snow angels and snow men and the fun of a snow-ball fight when the it packs just right.

But enough of that shit. I hate that solid precipitation with a passion bordering on the type of insanity that puts people into a hospital for life. I want it eradicated. Done away with. Gone.

I’m a big fan of global warming. I couldn’t even totally despise the film Water World, because you’ve got to like an Earth where it’s so warm there aren’t even polar ice caps. And it would be cool to have gills.

Last weekend, we got our first round of snow, about 6 inches worth. I did my usual 2 hours plus with the snow blower and cleared the drive and the walk and where my neighbors got plowed in and felt only the growing disgust a man can have for his chosen climate. So it was with glee this week that I watched the temperature stay above freezing and the rain come down: I’d sooner live in mud than with snow.

Yesterday the snow was all but gone. I looked out the window on the back yard, and in the woods behind the yard I saw one last measly pile of the white stuff. It looked sad and forlorn, alone amid the fallen leaves and tufts of grass and broken branches on the ground. It reminded me of a lost soldier, a comrade behind enemy lines who wanted nothing more than to be reunited with his brethren. My heart went out to this little of accumulated flurries.

So I almost felt bed when I put on my boots and walked out there and stomped the pile of crap into the ground until it melted.

But not quite.

Christ, I wish I could live in Florida.

The funniest thing my friend Mark Smith ever said:

I can’t remember what grade we were in, probably 8th or 9th, but we decided we’d participate in the YMCA’s Walk-a-thon to raise money to combat some disease. It was a six mile walk from our home town of Hornell on the back roads until we reached the fire/police station in neighboring Canisteo (home, by the way, of the World Famous Living Sign). Mark and I weren’t exactly in the greatest shape (then or now), but we did it. Even raised some money.

As we were making our way, at one point we passed a sign that said:

Mark read the sign, turned to me, and said, “Pity there’s a retard center around.”

I must have laughed for 20 minutes. Had I been drinking milk it would have come shooting out my nose.

(I realize this isn’t a particularly ‘politically correct’ thing to laugh at, but I never even heard that term, let alone followed such tenets, until I got to college. There I was well known for telling one of the dining hall managers to watch his mouth when he referred to the challenged folks who worked in our dish room as “the fucking ‘tards.” It’s a shame I feel I even have to explain myself. Oh well. Still, to this day, I never pass a sign saying SLOW CHILDREN AT PLAY to this day without smiling. And speeding up. )

Self promotion and capitalism do pay! I just got a check in the mail for 14 smackers from CafePress, the fine people who let me put up the Squished Frog Store. They do all the work, get most of the money, and I get a little something on the side. Plus, I get cool collectibles with my logo on them. Gotta love it.

From The Norm: "What is it about flowers that women like so much? It's simple. Women like to have evidence that you thought of them. Flowers are evidence. Simple."

I have always wanted to living in a house or building with its own name. I don't like saying, "I'm going home." I want to say, "I'm going back to [[fill in the blank]]."

When I was in college, some guys I knew lived in an apartment on campus. They were the Garden Apartments, so people could say "I'm going back to the Gardens," but these guys named their apartment. It was called The Asylum. I loved that.

When Bon and I started to search for our first apartment together—yeah, we've been living together now for over 10 years, since our senior year of college began – we looked into an apartment in a building called "The Home." It wouldn't have sounded as cool to say "I'm going back to The Home" (sounds a lot like "I'm going home"), but then again, I'd have taken it. Except the place smelled like ass.

I was even jealous of the kids on The Real World in New Orleans, because their house had a name. But they also had to live with the annoying Mormon chick, so it was a wash.

So, now, I want to name my house. It's a bright green colonial, so I'm thinking: The Greenery. Except that sounds like I like plants a lot, which I really don't unless I'm using them as kindling. The Frog Cave won't catch on. I'm stymied on this one. I truly am.

Bonny just got a brand new PC (tax deduction! Cha-ching!) from Dell, a 1.8GHz Pentium 4 and I spent about five hours last night and a couple more this morning just getting the stupid thing up and running, ostensibly so I could "Ghost" the hard drive so that when problems potentially occur down the road, I could restore the drive from CD backups and all would be right with the world.

It's got XP Professional, which I've been using for a month and so far, it's been great. But this new system... first I had to swap out the modem from Bon's old Pentium III 600 to get connection faster than 36kbps. Then Windows update repeatedly crashed every time I tried to get the latest updates. I really wanted to setup her portable hard drive to take advantage of USB 2.0's mondo-fast 480Mbps data rate, but WinXP doesn't support USB 2.0 yet, and won't have drivers until 2002. Even Norton LiveUpdate was flaky, and wouldn't register the software or download new virus definitions for a while.

I can probably blame a lot of the above on the Internet connection being flaky, because who knows, maybe 50,000 other people got new Dell's last night that needed to be upgraded. But when I finally got it up to date, I tried to do one last thing: run ScanDisk to make sure the hard drive is okay (after all, Ghosting is a drive-level backup, so it pays for the drive to be in good shape). But the way XP checks things, it must reboot and run Chckdsk, which crashes on her computer every time because the sound card driver tries to load in the middle of it.

Finally, I gave up on that, defragmented the drive anyway, and started the Ghost process.

And of course, Norton Ghost 2002 won't recognize her CD-R drive.

I still like Windows XP, but I think I'm less in love with factory-born PCs than ever.

(and no, you can't have her old computer, I need it for my home network for work.)

Lots to post. No time to talk. Well, maybe a little. But not right now.

This kind of thing is exactly why no civil liberties should be taken for granted in this country, especially after 9/11 when people are more than willing to do so, it seems. I read this morning that someone wrote to a newspaper editorial page saying "there's something more important than personal freedom: living."

Which is bullshit. Personal freedom is worth dying for, which should be part of why we're at war. But for too many, it's just vengence. And believe me, I was on the vengence bandwagon well into October, so I know. But it's got to be about more.

We own a big stand-alone freezer that sits in our basement and is generally packed to the top with the dead flesh of animals for us to rend with our teeth and fill our stomachs with their juicy protein. Most of it seems to be for the dogs because Bon has them on a natural diet, but there's always some chicken in there for me.

I love chicken. I could eat it every night, and I practically do.

Because we have the freezer, Bon buys a lot of meat in bulk deliveries, which means we then have to separate it out into usable portions using plastic containers, ziplock bags, etc. Because I like chicken so much, we always get a lot of chicken breasts and stick them in bags and store them flat. Which brings me to one of my all time favorite things to do: label the meat packages.

For example, I never call a bag of chick hearts (for the dogs, relax) just "hearts." I use the dry erase marker to draw heart like on a Valentine. Once I tried to draw one with an aorta, but it didn't come out.

So you can imagine how I am when I come to labeling the chicken breasts. To date, these are the terms I've written on the bags o' breast:

Last night I had dinner with my friends from the days of the WildWeb and we talked about movies, blogs of our other previous co-workers, the work of Greg Rucka, comics (it's what we call the "geek-out"), and where we all were on 9/11 when we heard the buildings were coming down. Jason's mom worked very close to the Twin Towers, in a building that was damaged slightly when they fell. The rest of us saw it on, Ezra and I were both at our respective homes (unemployed), Josh watched it on TV all day in his office. We ate barbecue and used wetwipes and laughed and drank and it was all good.

Oh, and to make my day start out with sunshine and roses, we got between 6 and 9 inches of snow last night.

And no, my lawn tractor with the plow on the front won't start.

I've got many nicknames for my wife. Some of them I can even share in mixed company. One of them I use frequently is "Crazy Dog Lady."

This isn't a reflection upon her as much as it is on the company she keeps. She belongs to three dog clubs, one for Boston-area Labrador owners, and two canine agility clubs. Today, we went to the Christmas party for one of the clubs, ARFF (Agility is Really Fun for Fido – no, I'm not making that up).

We've been to this same Xmas party before. It's held at a canine training center in Nashua, New Hampshire, about an hour north of our house. We arrived just in time for the setup of food and crates. Every woman in the club has usually a soft-side canvas crate for holding their dogs while the owner is busy, or some of the older metal crates that are "portable" in the same way that cellular phones were portable in the early 1980s, if you were willing to carry a car battery to power the 9 lb. monstrosity.

Notice I said every "woman" in the club. That's because there are no guys. Out of around 40 people and 60 dogs, I was the only male of my species there. That's strike one.

Bonny, bless her heart, is a big part of this club. I can't remember if she's an officer, or VP, or co-chair, or whatever it is she does exactly. She could be grand poobah, and I think that would be cool, but only if they made her wear the big fuzzy blue hat with horns like Fred and Barney used to wear on The Flintstones.

Anyway, because she's in the thick and has been doing agility with these ladies for a couple years now and knows them all, she's off in social land while I'm thrilled there's a men's room to be had. (Obviously we've been to Xmas parties before, many a time, but usually when it's for work, I'm sitting with her the whole time or she can at least fit in since we're both in the tech journalism industry. When it comes to dog agility, I'm strictly a spectator. Not that I couldn't run: I just don't have the gene that says it's important enough to strive at such a thing.) So, strike two.

So that had me feeling all sorry for myself at the beginning of the party, but I got distracted for the next three hours by trying to eat without looking like a pig and trying to control the two Labra-idiots, who were absolutely spastic over the joy of being in that building filled with other dogs and food and noise and toys and games and food. Bon was helping organize a couple of games, one a dog agility version of musical chairs (don't ask) and then a bit of fun based on a card game she bought. Since she was organizing and helping run it, she couldn't play it with the dogs. So I took them out for some fetch and to, how you say, 'make zee doo.' When I came back in, the game was over. Bon said to me: "Get me out of here. I want to go home."

It seems that one or two of the crazy dog ladies didn't like the game my wife planned so carefully, and instead of offering up their constructive criticism at a later date, decided to spout it in her face right there. That's another problem with some of these clubs: while a great number of these people I've come to know though Bon I respect and like, there's always a few who's entire lives are so wrapped up in their dogs and nothing but that they've got the social skills of your average back-alley mugger. So, that rudeness, combined with the constant barking of dogs, and the sheer amount of dogs people were letting off leash (which seriously annoys some other dogs and can end with bad scenes) had given her a headache stationed over her left eye ball.

So I said, "I'll pack."

We hit the road and talked about it. I felt bad for her, since she'd worked hard to help organize this thing and it always hurts to do something like this and not feel appreciated. Bon said her friend Chris had the right idea: stop in, say hi, eat, and then leave. She thanked me profusely for putting up with it all, and she understood how uncomfortable I felt being the only person with a Y chromosome in the building. I told her I'd probably skip the party next year. She said she might, too.

Not a very festive holiday feeling all around, I'm afraid. At least the dogs were happy. They got extra cookies.

At the site I run, PracticallyNetworked.com, there's a feature that lets anyone who reads a review post their opinion about a product, hopefully based on their experience. In the 2.5 months I've been running things, no one has posted anything strange, just the occasional double posts. I can go and delete the second one. No problem.

Until today. I started getting email from the feedback form saying: "Porn photo posted in forum " and "There is an adult-X picture posted on your website." I checked it out, saw the photo, and deleted it post haste.

And the horror of that photo is still with me. If only it had been just some plan old porn, but no... this was an anatomical piece of disgust featuring one man with... christ, i can't even type about it, it makes me want to throw up. Suffice to say, I'm going to make sure that in the future HTML code doesn't work in those forums.

I'm getting sick of all the tests out there that seem to be built specifically for people with regularly updated online journals to use as filler for their real content. Some are great (who can resist finding out what disease they are?) but others are just filler (knowing what James Bond villian I am is not really that interesting. I found myself making sure to answer question I was sure would make me come up as Pussy Galore or the bad guy from Live and Let Die, whatever his name was. I ended up being the Man with the Golden Gun, which I guess could be worse).

That said, I liked this one: it's worth reading the test to read the provided answers, let alone finding out that...

I am a Lobster Telephone. For nine potatoes have my multi-throttled keys subdued the nice leaves of strangers. Sprays of wild satin guacamole enters my document. I relish four mushroom deals with metal. Do you bite the wax tadpole? The Utterly Surreal Test

I finished all my Christmas shopping tonight except for one damn item (thanks for nothing, Home Depot). And, of course, i don't have everything in hand that I've purchased, as some of it's coming in from eBay sellers and from my beloved Amazon.com. I found yesterday that I can go back and check everything I've ever purchased from Amazon since 1997. Scary. If that doesn't prove the existence of Big Brother, nothing does. Luckily, the Amazon Big Brother is a benevolent sibling who prevented me from buying the same crossword puzzle book for my grandmother this year that I got her last year.

I was at the brand new Target (which my former coworkers at Access always pronounced as if French, a habit I retain) outside of Worcester looking for some items and for some reason stumbled into the clock aisle. I get strange waves every few months where I get obsessed over buying certain items but never quite bring myself to the point of purchasing them. I've done it with office supplies, I've done it with lamps, I've done it with shelves. My current obsession was with clocks, at least until tonight. But not just any clocks: I've wanted an atomic clock, one that would automatically reset itself to the proper time by intercepting the radio signals of an atomic clock in Colorado. I've seen them in catalogs, for sale on the Web, all over, but couldn't decide on one I wanted.

But then I saw one at Target: an atomic digital wall clock with numbers 3 inches high, plus it's got a thermometer and calendar display. I couldn't resist. And the only price I could find near it said $19.99. So what the hell. I took it up with my other purchases. When she rang it in and it was $39.99, I didn't even blink. What the hell. I brought it home and it hangs right now on the wall in front of my desk, where I can see it all day.

But does it work? The atomic clock radio signal is supposedly best recieved between 12 and 3 am, and my clock is still looking every few minutes for the signal. I guess I'll know tomorrow.

Oh, the Windows XP clock also while check itself against an atomic clock using the Internet. Right now, my two clocks are about 10 seconds apart. I can't wait to see which keeps the best time. I've got the most faith in XP at the moment... I set my watch against it, and my watch chime for the top of the hour syncs almost perfectly with the network bumpers between shows in primetime. And let's face it: network primetime is the final authority.

I can't decide which I want on my tombstone when I die. Either "Never turn down a job you haven't been offered yet" or "Despite the cavities, he took care of his teeth.

Adding to the bad news is how many people I know that are still (or on the way to becoming) unemployed. In the last couple of weeks, I've been asked by a couple people to be a reference, had another quiz me on job searching, and another friend tell me he's putting his house on the market in anticipation of a February lay off. Most of the Access crew is still out of work.

Blessings: counting them right frickin' now.

Last night I wrote the annual Griffith Holiday Newsletter. For the past several years, I've written one (which Bonny then usually rewrites, sucking all the rude, yet funny, parts out) which tries to encapsulate the year in a page or two that I then e-mailed to all my friends online so they'd be forced to give a crap about what happened to me, and we also printed it out and put it in with what few Xmas cards we send.

I started out verbose, as usual, but it seems like a litany of bad news, so I cut it down to just a few graphs, probably the shortest letter yet. I threw it on the server (yes, I've kinda got a server going now... don't ask) from the laptop and called it up on Bon's system. She read it while I was brushing my teeth.

"Wow," she said. "That's a really depressing letter."

I couldn't argue. My grandmother died. The Twin Towers fell. I lost my job when Access shut down. Bon lost most of her clients when they shut down. Outside of some agility titles she got on Caper and the fact that I got my current job with PracticallyNetworked.com, there wasn't much good newsto write about our lives in 2001.

So, I'm thinking this year I might just send everyone a note saying, "Hey, be thankful, it could be worse" (and believe me, I know it could be) and a picture of the dogs and tell them if they really want to know about what's up, visit our blogs because recapping it all in a note is just not fun anymore.

Today is a day that has lived in infamy.

Brutal honesty at Kyouki's Weblog.

Now this is highly embarassing, because whenever I want to bust on Bonny about what I consider the incalculable number of shoes, boots, and clogs she owns, I start calling her "Imelda," which never fails to get a rise out of her. Imelda's other crimes never occur to me, because I figure having that many shoes was crime enough against her husband. Now I feel bad. But not bad enough that I'll stop calling her that when I see another pair of spiked sneakers for agility come into the house.

Which Evil Criminal are You?

My wife should have been a copy editor. Be aware that without her, the previous post would have been riddled with typos and screw up and mistakes. You should all thank her.

I don’t go to movies alone. I find the very thought of it makes me feel like a complete and utter friendless loser who can’t scrape together another person to watch a film. I would feel stared at and pitied and shunned if I went to a movie alone. So I don’t. The last movie I went to alone was Clueless at the Copley Loew’s in Boston when I was in Boston for a business meeting one day and find myself way to early with three hours to kill. Before that, the last movie I saw alone was a midnight showing of Freddy’s Dead: Nightmare on Elm Street 5, and I only went because I had to write a review of it for my college paper by the next day.

Books, on the other hand, are a completely solitary effort. I have no problem whipping out a paperback when I’m in a queue (I’m trying to sound British here people, work with me) or waiting to get the oil changed. I’ve never had a problem with book reading solitude, but I do love to share reading. Right now Bonny and I are both reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in tandem, and it’s great to taunt each other with little details ("Did you read about the Quidditch World Cup yet?", "I can’t believe I didn’t realize the guy named Remus Lupin was a werewolf! Christ!").

Past great shared reading experiences:

I am currently reading Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban. Can't put it down. Will finish it today, my birthday present to me.

So, yeah, I'm 32. Which means exactly diddly squat. I've gotten to a point where I don't look back over the last year and see tremendous growth. Used to be I'd look over the previous year and see the signs: bought a house. Did such-and-such vacation. Got this-or-that promotion. Moved to cool new job.

Yeah, I'm better off now then I was at at 24, I guess. But am I better off than I was at age 27 (still working at FamilyPC, still in Northampton in my first house)? More experienced, yes. But happier? Smarter? That's a hard call. I've got a new job, but I still pine for the days of Access Magazine like the high school quarterback who's slowly realizing that his glory days are behind him and that soon all the geeks he pushed around in high school will be running companies and asking him to clean up a mess in the men's bathroom: "and oh, by the way, stall three needs a fresh roll of toilet paper there, Sparky."

National Novel Writing Month is over. I got about 5k into the 50k I was supposed to write and lost steam. I let the job and real life and a need to rest and a cold and playing with my dogs and my disgust with my own prose get to me, and that was that.

Strangely enough, however, I'm still thinking about the book. All the time. The protagonist and what he needs to do next are scratching at my brain, still hoping for a chance to do what needs to be done. So maybe I'm not done yet. I hope not. But I'll tell you, I won't be doing it in a month.

But if the next NaNoWriMo takes place during a time when I'm unemployed, well, hell, I'm there.

Bon got up around 6am yesterday, which is a very unique occurrence in this household. Her cold was preventing her from getting any sleep, so she said the hell with it and went to her computer. When I got up around 8:30, dragging my carcass to the bathroom, feeling like my head was one big inflamed sinus, she informed me: “We’re going to the beach today.” I would have argued, but it was hard to: the temperature soared up to 70º F yesterday. It sure didn’t feel like December.

So, we went up Route 128 to Wingaersheek Beach, a beautiful little stretch of sand and surf on Essex Bay in Gloucester (home of The Perfect Storm, made all the more fun because after October dog leases are optional. We were able to let Caper and Siren play in the salt water for a couple of hours, and took lots of digital pictures of them. Both mutts were on their best behavior too, which was nice, though Caper did manage to stick his nose directly into some woman’s ass as we were leaving. At least he’s consistent.

Real life conversation from our drive to the beach:

“So, what do you want for a special birthday dinner tomorrow” Bon asked me.

I didn’t answer her immediately because I was trying to decided what I could say that wouldn’t offend her. She wanted to cook for me, which is never a problem, but what I’ve been craving is some KFC Popcorn Chicken. Every time I see those damn commercials with Jason Alexander, I’m tempted to get in the car and go to the KFC/TacoBell drive thru up by the local Wal-Mart. Unfortunately, Bonny considers KFC the most disgusting fast food place in the world, which I think is unfair, because I’ve eaten at those A&W Root Beer places and just seeing their signs makes me want to throw up. And someday I’ll blog about how Roy Rodger’s makes me think of CPR and dead people.

Since I didn’t answer, she made a suggestion: “How about fish?”

She’s got me hooked on trout lately, and because it’s healthy, she suggests it all the time... probably about as often as I want to drive to KFC.

“Uh-uh,” I said with a vigorous headshake. “Hon, I like trout , but it’s still not something I’d pick as my favorite meal. I mean, if I was on death row and someone asked me what my last meal would be, trout wouldn’t even top the list.”

“Well then what would you choose as your last meal?”

I didn’t even have to think about it.

“I’d get fried chicken, McDonald’s French fries, and a chocolate cake. With a side of toast.”

“A side of toast? Jesus, carbohydrate city!”

“What the hell. You’re a frickin’ whack-job. You’re worried about my carbs? I’m going to the electric chair any second, to be shocked to my death, and you’re worried about that?”

“With all the fat in your arteries it should conduct the electricity pretty well,” she said.

Yesterday was December 1st. Happy Birthday to my friends Bill in Texas (he and I were in the nursery at St. James Mercy Hospital together) and Laura in Connecticut. Laura, sorry we didn’t come to the b-day party last night. We should have, since all we did was spend several hours wrapping Xmas presents.