I was looking for my old high school journals today (more on those later) and found a couple boxes of my old crap. These are proof positive of why no one should ever throw away anything.

For example, I found two of my class notebooks from my junior year. Just check out what I wrote at the top of page on in my math notes: "Welcome to Fun filled Math 11 with Mr. Miller in 143. Yaahoo."

That's pretty spooky that I predicted the name of such an internet powerhouse back in 1986. But at least my sarcasm skills were coming along. Witness further proof in my biology notebook: "Biology -- the building blocks of boredom."

I would have killed on a school open mike night.

Other stuff I found: a gigantic fake twenty dollar coin that I used to use when playing The Phoenix, a Star Wars stormtrooper pendant with no chain, my high school girl friend's bikini (she only wore it for me, figuring that if her parents knew I'd bought it for her they'd encase her in cement until she was 31), and this picture of me, taken in 1973:

How on earth did I ever turn out to be anything other than a used car salesman?

I want an apology from my parents for ever letting that jacket even exist.

Bonny has forbidden the use of the cliché term "in the driver's seat" in our house. That's because we're not in it anymore.

Why are we not in the dri-- in control any more?

Money.

Glorious, horrible, beautiful, awful money.

Or the lack thereof.

It started with our buyer's agent in Ithaca telling us chances are even if we make a bid on a house, no one will take us seriously. Because we don't have the cash on hand, plus our current place isn't on the market. Without seeing that, why would anyone trust that we'll be able to buy a house. Fine. That just made me want to dig in my heels and not move at all. It's not like I'm looking forward to packing and unpacking and all that crap.

Then we did a stupid thing.

The wife and I put together a budget to see how much we've been spending over the last year, and how much we're likely to spend in the next 12 months. Bonny filled an Excel spreadsheet with columns and rows and formulas and used headings like "Non Discretionary Expenses".

What it amounted to was finding out that, assuming I'm the only one making any money, we're spending about $1000 dollars per month more than we take in. So if Bon doesn't make around a grand per month, we can't pay utilities, groceries, taxes, etc. That doesn't even count buying things like clothes, books, haircuts, pet supplies, or porn. (

I did lump the DirecTV payment into the necessary stuff, however. I'm not a god damn barbarian.

What this boils down to is either Bon gets a job (ha ha, yeah, cause there's no competition out there in this market!) or we now MUST move. And just like that, WHAM!, we lost control.

It was nice while it lasted -- knowing that we could sell the house on our time table, move when we felt like, maybe even stay for another year if we couldn't find a great house in central New York. But the lottery winning feeling of all the money this house could bring is over.

Now moving out feels more than ever like... work.

I saw Mulholland Drive the other night, and I can safely say... "Huh?"

[[SPOILER WARNING: I'm going to ruin this movie's so-called ending for you if you keep reading.]]

I like an ambiguous film ending as much as the next guy. Sometimes more. However, it's one thing to leave the audience with a sense of "Did that really happen?" versus a sense of "What the hell just happened?"

Everyone knows by now that Lynch wrote and directed what was supposed to be a television pilot and when he got rejected, he got his actors together again to film an "ending." It's a shame, because, it was a great pilot. Crazy stuff, good character development, one of the funniest hit-man sequences ever, and a mystery that you're just itching to get to the bottom of. Who is Rita? Was that homeless guy real? Why were those old folks smiling so much? What's the connection between Betty and the director? Ann Miller is still alive??

It becomes quite obvious when the pilot ends and suddenly Lynch decided he was making a "film": about five seconds before the first nude love scene. (There was ample opportunity for similar nudity in an earlier shower scene where he managed to avoid showing boobies at all. ) After that very promising turn character turn, we're suddenly thrown back to the territory that helped make Lynch's Twin Peaks a parody of itself: dream sequences, red curtains, and special effects of miniature people. I was expecting an FBI agent to order pie.

Once again Lynch leaves me hanging like he did over a decade ago with Peaks -- starting so strong, then it becomes clear there was never any ending planned in the first place. (Thank heaven for creators like Joss Whedon who makes sure that each season of his shows ends with an actual ending.)

A reviewer of this film at IMDB.com said "Many reviews have mentioned that Mulholland Drive resembles a dream, and it does. Like a dream, it shortcuts to dead ends, it includes excerpts from other unrelated dreams, it lingers on what it finds fascinating, and disowns the ideas it finds boring."

Yes, it's like a dream, but the way Lynch handles it, it's also called cheating. You don't leave all these plot threads dangling when introduced so enticingly. You don't show a gun in act one and not have it come into play later. Or you can do something worse like this film did: show the gun and by the end have people wondering if that was really a gun, or was it a poodle? (That is not an actual example from Mulholland Drive... but it might as well be.)

(This has been building since I was 10 and my family would go on vacation, meet people and say "We're from New York" and the response would be, "Oh, really? What burrow?")

I can't stand when people refer to anything that's in the state of New York, but isn't in New York City, as "upstate."

Get out a map and follow along people.

New York City, while believed to be the Center of the Universe by many of its residents (and I shall be shunned like heretic for suggesting different, most likely), is not. It's just a dirty, urine smelling town with some nice architecture and effective mass transit (which, unfortunately, is the most urine-y smelling).

While everything north of NYC could, by some degree be considered "up," to lump the Finger Lakes area into the same area as Poughkeepsie, Buffalo, and the Adirondacks does the entire state an injustice.

I'll grant the people of NYC that area from Sing-Sing to Albany on the Hudson River, sure; you can have that as your "upstate."

But don't think that Ithaca, Syracuse, Binghamton, or the Finger Lakes are "up." For Christ's sake, most are south of Albany in latitude! Up indeed.

So, here's how it breaks down: There's Western New York (Buffalo). There's the Southern Tier (along Route 17, Jamestown to Binghamton, really). There's Central New York (Ithaca and Syracuse), and there's Northern New York, which is everything between the St. Lawrence River and Vermont, including the Adirondack Mountains.

Yeah, mountains in NY! Who knew, right?

(Sorry, I know it's not your fault you don't know anything about New York State. I don't know anything about any other states either, and revel in my ignorance, like saying that there's no difference between the two Dakotas, Nevada is just a dessert with casinos, Florida is nothing but old people and tourists, and that New Jersey looks just like the movie Blade Runner.)

The tradition in our house is that I feed the dogs each morning whenever they demand, but on Saturday, Bon takes care of them. (In a desperate attempt to get myself more sleep time, I've been known to bribe the wife into getting up for me with sweet offers: "Hon… I'll give you a crisp new five dollar bill if you feed the idiots." This sometimes works.)

Thankfully, though, Saturday's are my day to sleep in. Yesterday was no exception, even though we were at her parent's house. She got up around 5:30 to fill the piggies' trough, but never came back to bed. She was so obsessed with house hunting after seeing a couple places on Friday afternoon that she started typing up notes about them. She even did a questionnaire for us to fill out at each house so we won't forget the details.

My wife is nothing if not organized, god bless her.

We got to Ithaca about noon to meet our buyer's agent at an open house she was holding at one of the homes we'd toured the night before – a gorgeous colonial, practically right on the Cornell U campus, with Fall Creek running through the back yard. If it had perhaps one more room, it might be big enough for us. Hearing about how many bids it was getting -- some by people who hadn't even been inside the house yet, including a likely wealthy Cornell trustee -- made the pain of losing it seem a little less.

We had lunch with our buyer's agent, who we both like a lot despite the fact that she's not necessarily the greatest at returning phone calls (then again, we live by the phone—I can't imagine what it's like to have a job where you move around town that much). We ate at CollegeTown Bagel's, Ithaca's own localized bagel/deli chain. Good stuff. Just the amount of great restaurants in Ithaca makes me want to move back.

We toured three houses after lunch. The first was a 1970's concoction with no yard to speak of. It had perhaps the most gorgeous kitchen I've seen to date, but otherwise it was nothing we fell in love with. The bathroom off the master bedroom still had the shower/tub in that green avocado color so loved by everyone in that decade. (I’m always happy I can say I was not born in the 70's.)

The second house was the one we're giving serious consideration. It's a colonial built in the early '90s on a nice big 2-acre lot in Lansing, not far from the mall/shopping, on Murfield Drive (I keep wanting to call in Mulready). The problem is it needs some work. A coat of paint, new carpets (preferably no carpets -- we hate wall to wall carpet), some slight moisture damage in the basement, new window screens preferably not clawed to death by the cat, etc. And according to some analysis from our agent, it's a bit overpriced. We didn't fall in love with the house on first sight, but it's one we keep coming back to.

The third house we looked at was one I needed to get out of my system: it was on the top of a hill outside of Dryden, in an area were I can't even get cable (thus no broadband, which ain't happening), but it was so damn big I just needed to see it. This house has no less than six bedrooms and 3 full bath rooms. Two of the closets on the second floor were about 10x12 feet. I've seen smaller studio apartments. The living room had a 60 inch television, which was necessary just to see the screen from across the room. The master bedroom had room in it for an office plus a Jacuzzi tub in the master bath. All in all, it was so large that even with the huge amount of crap we own, we'd still leave about 1/3 of the house vacant if we bought it. Which we won't.

We drove down to the lake after the last house, to say good-bye to my in-laws as they set up for a night to sleep on their boat. The water in Cayuga Lake is so high that the boat is about 2 feet higher than normal, so my mother-in-law, Linda, almost fell in as she was trying to get off the boat with some food. She served us some sodas (I had a full-fledged Coka-Cola, which happens about once a year for me) and pastries. I had a cinnamon bun. Then a neighbor brought over cupcakes filled with strawberries or something. Why must people ruin perfectly good food by inserting fruit into it? I pretended the cinnamon bun was enough to avoid it's fruity-filled nastiness.

As we drove back toward my in-laws house and the dogs, debate ensued over whether Ithaca is still too expensive. To me, the whole point of making this move is to save money. My dream: sell our house for a profit of $150k, use half to buy a house out right, then invest the other half and live off the interest for ever!

Which won't happen if we want to live in a town like Ithaca. That lead back to the other debate: why not buy a house in a cheap place like, oh, Hornell (where my family lives) or Greene (where my in-laws live)?

Bon said if she was going to settle somewhere and (theoretically) raise kids, she'd take Greene over Hornell. Which, of course, I took umbrage with: Hornell has some skeevy parts of town, but I'd sooner raise a kid there than in Greene… Greene's just to --

"Go ahead, say it!" Bon railed. "Call Greene 'Podunk-ville!'"

"Uh, I wasn't going to say that. I was going to say… it's too 'rural'."

To prove me wrong, she drove me by some of the rich-people houses on the outskirts of town. We even drove down the street her grandmother now lives on and got out and walked around a house for sale. Yet that house is still $115k – and the thought of spending that much to live in Greene, a town who's economy hinges on a forklift business that has threatened to lay-off my father-in-law more times than I can count in just the years I've known him, makes me sick.

Besides, we'll never choose to live in Greene or Hornell, if for no other reason than to avoid making one side of the family feel slighted. Even though my dad said to me on the phone Friday night that maybe we should buy my in-laws place. I think Dad just wants me to have a barn like they've got in their back yard.

We got back around 6pm and played with the dogs until they were panting machines, ate some left over Chinese food, and debated and planned for buying and fixing the house on Mulrea—I mean, Murfield.

(In between, we did fun snooping around my in-laws place. We found a thank you note they received from someone who actually wrote "LOL" under a line. While I contemplated that the Internet culture has even infiltrated the note-writing sarcasm of middle-aged women, Bon distracted me with something even more mind-boggling. In the chest freezer my in-laws keep out in their back room, there were at several Tupperware containters. Bon held one up and said, "This is strawberry-rubarb jam I made. In 1984."

She wasn't kidding. The piece of masking tape used as a label said exactly that in her 13-year-old handwriting. Further spelunking into the depth of the freezer turned up 20-year-old broccoli, pork, and beans, and my favorite, a container of shredded zucchini from 1979. Twenty-three year old zucchini in stasis!

If I could find a stash of Star Wars action figures from that era in such suspended animation, I'd be rich. Of all the antiques to be collecting, food is one that I never considered.

This reminded me of when, as a teen, my brother was renting space for his band in the upstairs of a building that used to be a school in downtown Hornell. Exploring it, he found a cache of World War II vintage canned foods next to the old auditorium, including a five-gallon drum of 40-year-old peanut butter. I hope he didn't eat any.)

Around 9pm, I finally said, let's stop talking about the damn house. It was making my brain hurt. Then I went online and started shopping at www.improvementscatalog.com, considering things we'd want to buy for that house. It never ends.

Last night I dreamed of packing and moving and expanding they yard and cleaning out the basement and it just NEVER ENDS.

Today is Sunday. The dogs were up and ready to go out at 4:30, and I was ready to make them settle down but Bon yelled at me because we knew this would happen when we didn't let them out again after 10pm. Whatever. I had to go outside with them because it's not a fenced in yard and we still don't trust Kylie to not run off (though I doubt she'd go far knowing food was coming). I tried to go back to sleep, but after Bon told me I'd been snoring all night, I felt bad and tried to set myself on my pillow so I would sleep through my mouth. Then I couldn't sleep. I finally got up at 5:15am and started typing this.

So here I am.

We're closer to having a house and moving than we thought, but still not committed. And we've both admitted that's probably good. Neither of use feels completely ready to leave Massachusetts and our current home yet. I think I realized yesterday just how much I really like MA in so many ways. I just wish it was closer to central New York, which, to be honest, Ithaca is really the area that I seem to give a crap about. Thus we're right back to paying too much.

Having absolutely no family members who ever served in a war of any kind (except for my cousin who is currently on the USS Bataan running the 24-hour a day kitchen to feed God knows how many ravenous sailors), this particular holiday has never been much more than a three-day weekend for me. It used to mean heading to Stony Brook State Park in Dansville to storm the falls (imagine a number of 20-something men in eye patches with plastic swords wading in the water).

This year, Memorial Day Weekend means house hunting. That's right, we're back out in Central New York. There's a very promising house that went on the market this week, and we want a look see before the bids start coming in.

In the car last night, Bon and I started one of our all mighty lists: who to change addresses with, what to cancel, what to follow up on, should we move. It made it feel all a little more real.

To make sure all my work was done before we head off to Ithaca this afternoon for house tours, I was up at 5:15 this morning to feed the canines and then stayed up using my in-laws beloved cable modem to post some work. Don't tell me I don't know how to live.

So what else is new this week? INT Media, the company I work for, has deferred raises again for six months. For some reason the company doles out salary increases to the entire company at once instead of based on the date you started. I was due in January, along with everyone else, to get a salary/performance review, but they said then that the balance sheet could do with a wait until July. Yesterday, we were told that raises will not happen in July either, see you in 2003.

It's hard to complain, however, since I've got a job that I can take with me to a new house in Ithaca.

(FYI, anyone who's been trying to get to Facts Are Meaningless and find the site down, the site is in the process of visiting every weight station on I 95 all the way to St. Pete. Joe's move to Florida is on over the next few days and he had to pack up his server in a box and put it on the moving truck. No room for him to take such a device a Corvette. In fact, he probably can only fit himself, a vacuum, and one cat in that car. But at least he'll get there fast.)

If you've ever seen "Inside the Actor's Studio," you know that James Lipton, the host, gives new meaning to the words 'suck up'. His constant fawning stars is bad enough, but his incessant prattling over the French talk show host who created "the ten questions" is worst. Still, kissing ass works, as we all know, and it got Lipton on the man's show in France. I saw the footage of that appearance, and it really looked to me like the host didn't want Lipton anywhere near him.

Be that as it may, the 10 question are very good ones, and I'm sure the Hollywood elite think about how they'd answer them constantly, since being on Actor's Studio is a badge of honor these days.

With my own obsession with fame that I'll never achieve, I also have been thinking a lot about the questions. Actually, I've only been thinking about how I'd answer two or three of them, which makes the prospect of answering all 10 daunting, but I shall because you all deserve to know.

1.  What is your favorite word? Salutations.  (Saying supercalifragilisticexpialidocious seems pretentious here. Though I do know all the words to the song.)

2.  What is your least favorite word? Perhaps. Followed closely by maybe. I don't like to use them, and I truly hate hearing them.

3.  What turns you on or what is your favorite thing?  My wife's giggle. Better yet, my giggle at something my wife says.

4.  What turns you off? Inopportune phone calls.

5.  What sound or noise do you love? This is the hardest question here... if it was 'smell I love' I could tell you (good perfume), but sound/noise that I love? The sound of Windows booting up correctly? The strange "boing" noises from the TiVo menu? Homer's "D'OH!"? The UPS truck pulling up with a delivery? The silence of the lambs? I really don't know.

6.  What sound or noise do you hate? I loathe the sound of my oldest dog, Siren, flapping her ears at 5:30am to announce that she is prepared for her morning meal.

7.  What is your favorite curse word? Slit.

This requires some explanation. When I was in college, my freshman dorm room was right next to a guy named Kevin. He and I became friends and with three other friends we lived together junior year in an off-campus apartment.

Kevin is perhaps the most gifted musician I've ever known. I've only seen him play his violin twice, once in a video tape of a recital, another time at our friend Chris's wedding, but it would move you to tears to hear it.

We gave Kev the sobriquet of FuckFace. In fact, we still call him that. (Sometimes it's shortened to Fucker.) Kevin also had a gift for grousing and complaining that would mingle in the worst possible cursing you could imagine. There was a point where he constant referred to a part of the female anatomy by the above term, and I, like a lemming, picked up on it. Now, when should something happen to me that requires a quick expletive, if I don't think about it, I still almost invariably say "Slit!"

I feel so un-PC.

8.  What professions other than your own would you like to attempt? Law enforcement.

9.  What profession would you not like to do? Slaughterhouse worker.

10.  If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive? "You're early."

After I made the last post, I got a call from Bon requesting a new jacket. Turns out the one she was sitting in the rain in (during a 46 degree wind chill) was not water proof. Eric and Gore-tex, to the rescue.

I had to stand in the rain myself for half an hour before she was done timing another class of dogs so I could give it to her. The other women with her recording the running times (they're called scribes) started using me as a gopher to take scribe sheets to the main tent to be recorded.

The rain finally let up a bit as I waited, but there was no way I was going to get a chance to talk with the wife -- the trial judge immediately had put her to work laying out a new course for the next class. Apparently the judge, who is the only person who gets paid to attend, rules with an iron fist over more than just whether a dog qualifies or not. Time for the wife to become a judge, me thinks. (Actually I've thought that for a while.)

I came home, ate some re-heated pizza, and watched The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on TiVo. Now I'm playing with Web sites, upgrading MovableType to 2.1, that kinda thing. Maybe I'll write later, or tomorrow, if it rains.

This morning, I was fully prepared to drive 6.5 hours out to Ithaca, look at houses for a couple of hours, and then drive back. I've done stupider things.

I was on the road by 6:35 in rain so bad I saw a guy with a house boat in a side yard lining up animals two-by-two. The forecast called for one inch of rain, but I think we'd already received it by that time. To make matters worse, I realized I didn't have the transponder that would let me breeze though the toll booths on the Mass Pike, and a quick look in my wallet showed that I didn't have a bit of cash on me either. I hit an ATM in Worcester and moved on... and the rain got worse. My temper was flaring like the cuffs on bell-bottoms.

I started composing a blog entry in my head about how bad this trip was going to be. I figured once I lost the radio signal, I'd turn off the radio and end up spending the entire drive in deep thought about this potential move, my job, Bon's job/work prospects, the novel, the quality of Episode II, and the sad lack of musicals coming out of Hollywood. Too much thought... it inevitably leads me to being either depressed or invigorated... and I wasn't betting on the latter.

So, I turned around and went home.

There weren't any killer houses on the list to look at anyway.

Back home by 8am, I felt guilty because I was there with the girls (Kylie and Siren), while Bonny was with Caper at an agility match she'd helped organize for the Labrador Retriever Club of Greater Boston, one of three canine related clubs to which she belongs. Because she organized it, she had to work it. That translates to her sitting out in the deluge, maybe under a tent if lucky, all day long, working to make sure the match went off without a hitch. She was already in a bad mood yesterday when she went to set up the match site, since (as per rules handed down from that most asinine organizations, the America Kennel Club) the agility equipment couldn't even be fully setup the day before. After all, a competitor might drive to the site at midnite and walk the course, giving them an edge over everyone else.

Idiots.

Thus, Bon had been at the site since 7am setting up in the rain. My guilt got the best of me, so I drove the half hour to the site in Wrentham, MA, to at the very least give her our cell phone so she could be in contact if needed.

I consider it a testament to the great love we share that I was able to so easily pick Bon out of a crown of similarly dressed CDLs™* (amazing how many grey-green rain coates women wear). I stood behind her tent, where she was timing each agility run for about 10 minutes, wearing a bright red rain coat and a red and white FamilyPC logo emblazoned umbrella, until she looked over her shoulder enough to notice me (I didn't want to disturb her while working). She told me to take Caper home -- she wasn't going to run him. The class he was supposed to run in was the very class she was timing.

Agility matches run in a downpour so bad that the rain is coming in horizontal? Organizers who also paid to enter don't get to run? Pathetic. I'm not competitive enough to enjoy doing such a thing even in great weather, but what I was watching was completely the opposite of fun. The only sport that should continue in the rain is football, and that's only because those guys are paid so much, they should continue to play during volcanic eruptions at the 40 yard line.

So, without even time to give me a wet hug, I took my leave of the wife, grabbed the yunky-boy**, and split.

Now I'm home, at the 'puter. I think because Bon is down suffering at something she loves, I should do the same. So instead of reading the book I just bought or watching DVDs or organizing comics or selling stuff on eBay, I plan to spend the rest of the day writing (because I'm no Stephen King. Writing is to me, fulfilling at the end, but a monstrous struggle while I'm doing it). So I'll write stuff. Stuff for work, stuff for me, just... stuff.

*Crazy Dog Ladies
**short for "Yellow Monkey," one of Caper's many nicknames, along with Ass-boy

Well, sue me. I'm busy. This new set of job responsibilities has me jumping through hoops and then some. I actually thought I was working hard before. What a fool.

So, how was my week?

Bonny got the news a couple days ago that her last major client, ZD Smart Business Magazine, was being shut down. Not only does this mean she might not get paid for her last assignment (which was a bitch to do), she may never work in this town again. Or so she things. She doesn't have much experience with the whole "unemployment" thing, outside of watching me deal with it. She's not taking it well, but already things are looking up. She had, on a whim, sent a resume to our ol' Alma Mater at Ithaca College about a writer job they had open. And guess who called to give her a phone interview? Of course, or beloved, overpriced, underpaying IC. Seeing as we're likely moving back that way, I take it as a sign from a higher power. Or as close as I'll get without being hit by lightning.

Bon and I built an Agora-based shopping cart at Agility-Equipment.com. Check it out. It's even secure when you send in your credit card number, and very handy if you ever need a $450 a-frame for your dogs to climb. And who doesn't need that?

Over the next week, all the network programming I watch regularly is coming to an end for the season -- Simpsons, Angel, Buffy, West Wing, ER, 6 Feet Under, Raymond, etc. Some, like Futurama and Alias, are already over. This ushers what I like to call "healthy time." It's the time of year I finally break out of the winter cocoon that and spend some time outside on a regular basis, instead of just on the weekends. It may only be for an hour or two after I finish working, but its light enough out to allow it.

One of our favorite TV shows of the past year, 24, took a very strange and ugly turn at the end of the episode on Tuesday. I don't think I buy it. For those who missed it, consider this a spoiler warning, but for gods sake, if they don't go back and show a montage of shots that show just exactly where apparent traitor Nina has been trying to screw with Jack's day, I will have lost all respect for the program. And it's treading on very thin ice since the whole "fugue state" episode. If I want that crap, I'll watch The Young and The Restless.

Speaking of Y&R, Isabella had a stroke when the baby was born! And Jack didn't get custody of his baby from that witch Diane. Typical.

A quick, funny aside: Looking around on Realtor.com for giggles, I plugged in info to search houses for sale in the home of my youth, Hornell. For $119,900, I found this house for sale. This is remarkable for two reasons. This house is half the price of my current place, but it's on a hill in an area of town that, as a kid, I thought you had to be a millionaire to live in. Plus, it's right next door to the parents of my high school girlfriend. They hate my guts, so it would be great to live there and let my dogs 'do their business' in the neighbor's yard. Maybe I could stop by to borrow a cup of sugar or some power tools and start regaling them with stories about how I used to, ahem, "be with their daughter" in her bedroom when they'd come home unexpectedly and I'd hide in closets or climb out windows.

Good times.

Of course, living in Hornell ain't going to happen. Let's be real.

Bon and I decided to take yesterday to get our bearings about the possibility of living in the Finger Lakes area, back toward Ithaca. Starting out from her parent's place near Binghamton, we drove north on Interstate 81 almost to Syracuse, but got off on route 20 and drove West across the top of Otisko Lake, Skaneateles (pronounced Skinny-atlas) Lake and Owasco Lake. The town of Skaneateles is beautiful, with the downtown right at the northern tip of the water, and beautiful houses abound. All too pricey, of course. It looks like a bedroom community for guys who golf too much, anyway.

We took route 20 all the way over to Cayuga (pronounced kay-you-ga) Lake and down through most of the major towns on the east side of the water. I was hoping to fall in love with something -- especially Auburn, where Wells College is… it's an all girls school and wouldn't it be nice to be working there? -- but nothing looked particularly inviting. As my wife likes to put it, it's woodchuck country. And she's not talking the wildlife.

Really, the only option for us Ithaca (pronounced ith-ah-kuh) or the surrounding area. Ithaca is where we'd be comfortable with the people, the way of life, the way of doing things. The suburbs of town are all close enough to feel more than comfortable. We met with a buyer broker to talk terms and she gave us some listings to consider and we went and had lunch at the glorious State Diner (pronounced state die-ner) on State Street, the 24-hour grease fest with the fold down seats in the booths just like at the movies. It hasn't changed in the decade since I last ate there.

Over lunch, we looked at listings and thought one looked particularly good in Dryden. Driving by, we found it not so good—no yard, and next door to the worst looking house in town (it had plants growing out of the rain gutters) and the local bar. A couple other overpriced houses we drove by were nice but either had no yard or were so remote we could never get broadband at them, and we've got to have broadband. I'm not going through dial-up use on a regular basis again.

Where we go from here all depends on how much we really care for moving. It looks like we'll have to pay more than we wanted to get a nice place, so our savings -- the whole point of trying to move -- might not amount to much.

Overall, we ended the day tired and frustrated and feeling like there's be many, many more 5 hour car trips to Ithaca in the next few months if we were ever to find the perfect place. Because I didn't want us to make a decision about whether we should do this move while we were both cranky, I spent the ride back to her parent's quizzing Bonny about the times as a kid when she would accompany her late grandfather to cattle auctions, and how they slaughtered pigs on his farm. I know, most guys get such romatic talk out of the way during the first date, but it takes me a while to warm up.

Frozen Butter. Especially frozen butter patties handed to you at a restaurant. Is one supposed to actually spread this block? I usually end up hacking them to shreds like a piece of kindling and then sprinkling the shards of butter on the bread/biscuit/bagel I'm trying to eat.

(Has anyone but me noticed just how many of these "Things that Annoy the Ever-Loving Crap Out of Me" are related to food? That can't be good....)

It's not quite 10 years-- that will come on May 15 -- but damn close. It's been a decade since I graduated from Ithaca College.

Yet I know with some terrifying certainty that if I had to step back into the roll of "dining hall guy" and work as a supervisor in campus food service again, I could do it.

That's just sad.

I remember my senior year, second semester, I had earned enough credits in previous semesters that I could go part-time as a student and still graduate with no problems (not with honors, mind you, but at least I lacked problems).

That semester I was taking two real classes, one of which ended half way through the semester because the professor told us anyone who got a B or higher on the mid-term would get that same grade for the whole semester. When I got the B, I skipped class for the rest of the year. Toward the end, I was feeling a bit of panic, thinking he was full of crap and I was going to be getting a call from the office of the School of Communications telling me I wouldn't graduate due to my failing grade, but the prof was as good as his word. I got the B.

My third "class" that semester was a 4-credit independent study I took with one of my favorite professors from the college's writing program. Ithaca College didn't have a writing major back then, or I would have been in it. Instead, I majored in Television/Radio and minored in Writing, with a concentration in Scriptwriting. It all seems to go together so well back then, as I dreamed of making it big in the world of funny books filled with words and pictures.

For my independent study, I proposed writing a script adaptation of a novel, and trying to secure the rights to it. I choose Kurt Vonnegut's Bluebeard, a book I enjoyed a great deal when I first read it years before (I'd discovered Vonnegut as a college freshman, and I still consider his Slaughterhouse-Five the greatest book in the English language).

Long story short: I never got the rights or permission from Vonnegut or his publisher to write the adaptation, in fact I got a nasty note warning me I shouldn't, but I did it anyway. Or I sort of did. I never finished it. But I still have the print out of it with page after page of my professor's notes on it.

And I got an A minus.

Since I didn't go to one class and didn't work hard at the script, I had lots of spare time on my hands. So I used them to drink and party and have sex with all the cheerleaders I could find.

Ha, yeah, right. I used my spare hours to work for the college full-time, doing three different jobs -- I worked for the writing program helping in the Macintosh computer lab, I worked the regular computer room (filled with DOS machines! Brrr!), and at the dining hall where I'd worked since before I even took a class there. (Those two computer jobs are what got me my current career, though.)

Students weren't supposed to work full-time, but I wrote a note to the office of financial aid and told them how I was doing the college a great service by working so hard for them. So they let me, which I think pissed off the douche-bag that ran the dining hall where I worked. It probably didn’t help that I was great friends with the assistant manager, who couldn't stand the boss, and all the students liked me better than him, too.

I recalled just how out of touch I was with reality that semester last month, when NPR made a mention that it had been 10 years since the riots in South Central Los Angeles. Back in '92, I used to have lunch with my friend and fellow dining hall supervisor Kristina every week -- we'd leave our lunch shift and drive downtown to Pizza Hut and scarf down some personal pans. She asked me what I thought of the riots, which had been going on for a couple of days.

I said, "Huh?"

I've got a career now I never even imagined having during those four years. And I'm amazed that perhaps it's brought me full circle. This weekend, Bonny and I will be driving out to the Ithaca area to drive around and see if there's any locations we think would be worth living in, any properties worth looking at, any chance at all we'd move out there by the end of the summer.

Maybe being back in the shadow of the college (and the uber-University at Cornell) will give me incentive to write my book, finish my script so I can show it to Vonnegut before he dies, and to work hard at the career I've still got and love.

And I will likely end up saying "Huh?" a lot more.

Maybe Joe brought it on himself since he did sign up to get his site, Facts are Meaningless, reviewed. But, I think the review of his site that was posted as part of the Peer-to-Peer Review Project was excessively mean-spirited and negative. Maybe  that's what the writer, the "author" of the PixelKitty.net blog,  feels a "review" is all about. Or maybe she's a femin-nazi (hey, a Rush-ism!) who jumps to conclusions.

I could go through and point-by-point talk about why this "reviewer" is nothing but an ass of the large, red baboon variety, but, there's little point, as it won't change her image of Joe. His site has problems (most of which are my fault, since I designed it), but he's got bigger fish to fry than to fix them now – he's starting life over in a new state, and he and I will address those problems when the time comes. In the meantime, I'm just happy he continues to entertain with well written screeds against stupidity.

However, after reading a few posts, Joe's "reviewer" immediately decided he was a "freshman looking to get laid" because he made some comments about how he can hold his beer and that you don't always get "brains, beauty, and down to earth personality" in all women. She said "You ALWAYS find those qualities in ALL women. ALWAYS. Or they dump you for the insensitive dweeb you are."

Yeah, right. Yank the other one, it plays Jingle Bells. Even the most feminist of women reading this know that's utter excrement for reasoning. (If you don't, I know some women you could meet that lack one of those three, and I know a few who lack all.)

So, let's jump over to PixelKitty.net and rate her on the same criteria. (FYI, she's a freelance Web designer from Australia, mate.)

• Overall impression: Hectic and filled with non-content. She quotes her site stats program and links to other sites. How singularly uninteresting.
• Writing Style: See above. Links are lazy blogging. One or twice a month, maybe. Why not actually write something? Anything.
• Design: The typical over-designed, overly linking blog page. What's with the font? In IE 6, it's completely unreadable unless you highlight it with the cursor. Nice job with the CSS. And anyone who has a site with one of those dumb-ass stickfigure images of themselves is a frickin' moron. I hate those things. (Oh, am I being unfair and unreasonable? I'm so sorry!)
• Special features:  The blurry objects in the background that might be shot glasses filled with urine are... interesting? No, actually, they're annoying.  (Why would any blog need special features? It's an online journal, not an e-commerce or entertainment site, you mindless dumb-ass.)

Her final dig in her review: "...there is no About section. So you cant [sic] work out if this guy is 16 or 60, interested in bears, taking the piss out of himself or has a blog simply because he thought it would be 'kewl'. I personally think its [sic] the latter."

That dig couldn't sum up her own blog better.

As a friend of Joe's, I look forward to his every post, as does everyone else who knows him, and several people who don't. Joe's a not only the exact opposite of a chauvinist, he's perhaps too nice – his employers and his friends walk all over him (god knows I do, whenever the shit hits the fan, he's who I call) and all those 'beautiful, brainy, nice personality'-filled women would do even worse.

So, sure, I'm biased. He's my best friend.  But hopefully more people read this page than that review and will know that a trip to Facts are Meaningless might mean to extra </html> tags at the end of the page, but it also means you'll have something interesting to read from a great guy.

Not that I'm a genius, but I do want to point out that I did say Spider-Man would be one of the biggest films of the year. Based on the fact that it's had the biggest opening weekend in film history, it may very well be one of the highest grossing movies of all time. (Of course, the fact that they won't take discount tickets probably didn't hurt the box office receipts a bit. Greedy bastards.)

I have to admit, while at the 7pm show on opening night, it was not sold out, so I was beginning to think my prediction was dead wrong. As people filled in seats around us, we watched some of the true freaks that make my comic collecting hobby feel shameful: the guy in the black trenchcoat with a Spidey "black costume" t-shirt; some kid in a zoot suit, for whatever reason... maybe he thought this was The Mask;  one teen in  full red & blue Spidey costume, including the pants, only without the mask. I hope he did that because he lost a bet. Had it been me, I'd have worn the mask to hide myself.

"What do you think the ratio is in here of guys to girls?" I asked Bon.

"I dunno. Looks like maybe 60 to 40? Actually probably more like 70 to 30," she said.

"Yeah, that's what I was thinking."

"Still not the best place to pick up guys, though."

(Turns out that, based on exit polls, the audience was split 50/50, if you can believe that.)

So, yes, I saw Spider-Man.

It did not disappoint. Will see it again. Looking forward to the DVD already.

Was it perfect? No, few films are, especially superhero movies. Think of the terrible special effect of the Joker falling in Batman, or the dues ex machine of Superman turning back time, or Wolverine not wearing yellow spandex in X-Men, and I'm sure you'll agree.  (Though Unbreakable was pretty perfect... maybe the best super-hero movie ever.)

My biggest gripes about Spider-Man...

[[These gripes contain SPOILERS, so don't read them if you haven't seen the film.]]

1)      The Goblin was not very sinister. I think Defoe's performance was more than nuanced enough, but the character's sheer desperation made him more sympathetic than hated to an extent.

Nice homage to the comic, however, when he was killed by his own glider. Better yet, the Daily Bugle named him.... any crazy who wants to be taken seriously does not use the word Goblin, nor does he describe himself based on the color he wears. I don't think that even works for Green Lantern. (If that worked, today I'd be Purple Editor.)

2)      Danny Elfman's score was his usual Wagnerian crap. During the opening credits, it felt exactly like a watching Batman back in 1989 – the music wasn't a complete rehash of his Batman score, but it did nothing to distinguish itself. (Imagine John Williams doing a score that didn't distinguish itself – Star Wars doesn't sound like Indy, which doesn't sound like Private Ryand, which doesn't sound like Jaws...) There's no reason to run out and buy the Spider-Man sound track, unless you like the screeches of Macy Gray. Elfman hasn't done anything unique since he penned the theme to The Simpson's, though he does occasional good work for Tim Burton. But I'll bet that's more Burton's influence than Elfman's.

3)      Not enough chatter. In the comics, Spider-Man is known for constant stream-of-consciousness insults and jokes as he's smacking around the bad-guys. It's long been one of Peter Parker's stranger, yet more entertaining, defense mechanisms. There was some of it in the film (I loved when he webbed Jonah's face and said "Sonny, you let mom and dad talk now"), but not nearly enough.

There's a list of editing bloopers from the film up already.

What did I love?

• Great performances by all, especially Tobey – he's now the one true Peter Parker, just like Michael Keaton is/was the one true Bruce Wayne.
• Kirsten Dunst in a wet dress. Hell, Kirsten Dunst even several layers of wool is good for me.
• JK Simmons at J. Jonah Jameson was perfect.
• Aunt May wasn't an incredibly frail old lady like she was throughout the 60's and 70's before they killed her (and then brought her back to life... don’t ask, it's a comic's thing).
• The fact that if you stayed to the end of the closing credits, they played the Spider-Man animated theme from the 60's.

The film's been picked on by some for a thin plot, a week second half, and special effects that didn't keep Spidey well grounded. Computer Generated Image (CGI) effects these days are pretty easy to spot, much like stop motion/claymation is, and you have to accept that to an extent. It's not hard when you're willing to suspend disbelief that super-heroes could exist in the first place.

Be sure to check out my love letter to the movie studios for screwing me out of an extra $2.75 per ticket today over at Bad Samaritan: The Next Generation. And then go to your local cineplex and see Spider-Man on Friday anyway.

Happy birthday to my uncle, David. He's my dad's younger brother and one of the greatest guys alive. He lives in Virginia and my parents are down there right now visiting. I think. They might be on the way home. I haven't kept very good track. It's been a busy week already.

I inherited more work this week. I'm now in charge of another site at work, and it's going to mean a lot more daily grind writing since I have to do news stories. I find myself constantly reloading my pages at NewsAlert waiting for a story to pop up that I can follow up on. It's quite nerve wracking. I'm not sure how regular beat reporters deal with it. But I guess I'm finding out.

We got our check from the feds this week, complete with the extra $50 bucks, which was nice. I needed it, as my checking account had ebbed to single digits after the last mortgage payment. Paying $500 to get the brakes on the car totally replaced this week didn't help either.

On the house side, we move closer and closer to what feels inexorably like a move out of town: we've got three realtors coming over in the next two days to check out the place and give us the market value on our house. The house down the street that spurred all this on still doesn't have a sign that says "under contract" but I'm pretty sure it is.

A higher power seems to want us to know about what's going on with that place, as Monday night a woman stopped by my house to talk to me about the neighborhood. She's the mother in a family with three kids that bid on the place already. As of that night, she was putting in a second, higher bid that would bring them right up to asking price. If whoever they were bidding against that night went higher than asking, that bidder would probably get the place. So, I'm pretty sure it's a done deal.

Remember, this is a $359,900 house with only three bedrooms and 1.5 baths, no garage. We've got that plus more yard and 2 full baths. And their place was bid on in less than 10 days. So who knows. By September maybe I'll live on Cayuga Lake.