As the wife was getting ready to leave for her agility class tonight, she asked me about my day. What was there to say? It was my first real day back from vacation (yesterday I didn't work, spending instead 11 hours getting my brand new PC up and running). It was just like every other day. Some are better, some are worse, whether that means productivity, or enjoyment, or whatever.

"Did you think it was going to be any different?" she said.

The problem is, yeah, I kinda did. I have no idea why I should think that. The things I accomplished in two days of writing full time while sitting in a non-Internet enabled lodge in New Hampshire may have inspired me to greatness, but it's tempered severely when you have to do your 9 to 5.

Worse, I felt like I should catch-up on on reading some blogs, so I did that for the last couple of hours, with Family Guy and Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law episodes playing in the background. Now, I don't even want to write this... I want to go read another Harry Bosch novel, or watch more TiVo-ed shows from last week.

I'm tired and cranky. Tomorrow, I think maybe I'll try to get out of the house. It certainly seemed to do wonders for me last week.

Except for a visit to the Tops to buy cinnamon—the secret ingredient in the wife's blueberry chutney recipe, delicious over marinated chicken!—I haven't been out of the house all week.

It's been a blur of Wi-Fi (pronounced: wiff-ee), WiMax (pronounced: whim-ask) and ultrawideband, with a pinch of prime time television (no LOST! No Scrubs! Argh!) and a healthy dollop of "The Black Dahlia," a book so well written that when I play the dialog over in my head like a movie, it sounds like poetry. Shakespeare in murderous 1940's Hollywood, loosely based on the real crime. Imagine a 1950's cop movie, all that great dialog, but with cussing. Excellent stuff.

Today however, I break free of the confines of my home to travel to NJ, the mandatory resting place before the day trip into Manhattan to see Spamalot. There, I will likely laugh until milk comes out my nose, without even drinking any milk.

I'm just as likely to be aroused though... the last time I saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail was in 1987. I was 17, I was in perpetual horniness... and I was showing the film to my girlfriend for the first time.

At my house. Sitting on the couch. Alone. No adults at home.

Oh my, yes.

A wonderful night, capped off by the fact that I never saw the end of the film.

Oh. My. Yes.

I doubt the Wife will even let me get to first base while we're sitting in the Shubert Theater, though.

Anyway, I'm off to the Tops for one more trip... I need to buy some groceries for my dad, who in his role as The Nicest Guy In The World is coming out to house and dog sit for a couple of days. Once I give him a half hour drill instruction on how to operate the TiVo (heaven forbid the Nicest Guy also embrace time-shifting of TV...), we'll be on our way.

You can't go home again. Because who could afford it?

When we sold our house in Hudson, Massachusetts back in 2002, the first thing we tried to do is post it on a site called ISoldMyHouse.com, a Web site for New Englander's trying to do a "for-sale-by-owner" to avoid paying broker fees, also known as the greatest financial ass-rape of the modern age. Especially in Massachusetts, where a mere shed on a driveway could probably garner $50,000 if sold by itself. (Sadly, we ended up panicked and sweet talked into giving our listing to a agent. To this day, we can't pass a Re/Max office or a hot-air balloon without setting our teeth on edge.)

Maybe it'll go better for the folks who bought that house. Because as of two days ago, it is back on the block. My friend Vikki, looking for houses for the last year without any luck, was sent the new listing, which went live just two days ago on, yes, ISoldMyHouse.com. And, of course, property values have again gone up. The asking price is almost $80,000 more than we sold it for.

It's painful to see the pictures. Not because it isn't a great house -- it is frickin gorgeous, inside and out-- but because it looks like in one of them they took down the fence in the back yard to, I dunno, park behind the house? I swear I see the fence posts from our professionally-installed, black-coated cyclone fence resting against the shed in the foreground.

Worse, the third picture? That's one I took! It is over three years old. How do I know it's mine? That's my recliner chair, inherited from my father-in-law, the one sitting right next to me in my basement office right now that Caper sleeps in all day when I'm working. That's our swing-arm floor lamp next to the chair. That's the dining room table and chairs I bought off a friend back in 1997. That’s our Labrador-print throw blanket over the back of the chair. If I had some super-high-tech-sci-fi photo software like they use on the tee-vee cop programs, I could probably enhance the image enough to show my own reflection in the back window. Unbelievable. I'm reprinting it here since, well, god damn it, I took the picture!

I loved that house, but it's not like I'd buy it back. I have no desire to live in Hudson again for one, and more so I certainly would never be able to afford a mortgage on the place now, even with all the equity and what little price increase there might be if we sold our place here in Ithaca. But I hope Vikki goes to take a look at it. It would be pretty cool to visit and see if my old basement office is still painted canary yellow. I always liked that. And I want to find out if those idiots took down that damn beautiful, expensive fence.

I'm nervous as hell about going to see Jon Stewart tonight. The specter of horrible visits to Cornell when I was an undergrad is rearing it's headless corpse on a black mare, ready to run me down in the woods like a squat, fat Ichabod Crane.

The cold is likely to be the worst part — I anticipate that we'll be waiting outside for around an hour, maybe more, in 15 degree Fahrenheit cold. I've ordered the wife into multiple layers. I've been wearing my thermal underwear since 6:30 this morning in anticipation.

Yesterday, I actually went over to Cornell yesterday and reconnoitered the area, trying to scope out parking, waiting areas, etc. Probably a good idea since I really haven't walked on that campus in about 14 years and had no idea what building this... concert? Performance? What exactly is it called? is going to be in. Turns out that Barton Hall is the Cornell gym. I poked my head in yesterday and found a building the size of a couple of football fields and a ceiling about four stories high.

As I walked around what was essentially a four block area, dressed in a thick Carhart jacket, scarf, gloves and ear-grips, I was freezing down to my nads. Had someone flicked my scrotum with a finger, they would have heard the skin shatter like the thin glass of a Xmas ornament. And that was at least in the 20s. Tonight I'll augment with another layer, a balaclava and maybe even my neoprene ski mask over that.

Parking is always a problem at Cornell, there's no chance we'll get within a quarter mile of the place, so that's a crap shoot. Bonny will be on Cornell campus for an agility seminar, so I'm going to pick her up in the Livestock Pavilion — dirt floor and all, such a high-tech campus — and from there we'll drive toward Barton to scope things out, see if we need to get in line. I'm not even prepared for what we do if we don't have to wait in line in the cold... that will throw my plans all asunder and I might just have to go home with the $64 dollars in tickets in hand.

Somewhere in my home, my wife has hidden chocolate-chip-filled sugar-cookies. She claims that they are hidden in plain sight, easy to find if I really wanted them.

I really want them.

And I can not find them. Anywhere.

I'm ready to fucking kill someone.

"I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti."

It's 6:30am here, and typical for me on a Saturday, I couldn't fall back to sleep after feeding the idiots their breakfast. Monday through Friday that's never a problem, since those are the days I have to get up. But come the weekend, when the world is my oyster, my brainmeat seems to say, "Get out there, get going! Face the day. Carpe diem, caveat emptor, ipso facto, ad naseum, buster!"

I think that Latin translates to "Today, in fact, seize a cautious buyer until you puke again and again." Tho maybe not. I never took Latin, I learned most of what I know on Law & Order reruns.

So I'm sitting here in my dining room, watching deer in my front yard try to find something to eat under the snow, which is again falling in great fluffy chunks, trying to think about something to write about from the past week. It was a span of days that was very typical in it's overall effect at boring the crap out of me.

I bought tickets yesterday to see Jon Stewart (the The Daily Show) perform next Friday at Cornell. I was heartbroken a couple of weeks ago to find out he was performing and that tickets were sold out before I even knew. But yesterday, in a quick perusal of the local papers online, I saw that he added a second show and bopped right over to the ticket page at Cornell.edu and snagged a couple. Though I was still on the fence about it... the seats are general admission and we'll likely have to stand outside in line for a couple of hours waiting to get in. That's always big-ass fun in the winter.

Not to mention the wife — whom I call "The Squantillion" — and I have a horrible track record of attending things at the Cornell campus that goes back to 1990. Back then, in the heady days of our relationship, I would frequently try to drag her up to Cornell to see movies, since the film board there always got in some unique stuff and had great crowds.

Two of my fondest memories of my freshman year (before I met the future wife) involve movies at Cornell. One was seeing Pink Floyd: The Wall for the first time and finally understanding what all my friends in high school had raved about for so long... that film and its message haunted me for weeks. I felt heartily stupid for resisting their entreaties to watch their much viewed VHS tape.

The other was sneaking away from the dorm—which was a whole big story in itself—to see a second run of the original Die Hard with the most enthusiastic crowd of students I had ever witnessed. It was the first time I'd ever seen a crowd so in love with what it was watching.

The memories of those great times were something I always wanted to recapture after, but it seemed that any time Squanto and I would venture to the East Hill of Ithaca, something would go wrong. Tickets were sold out, parking was impossible, students were rude, weather was bad, shiny demons would pop out of the earth to try and eat our souls. You name it, it went wrong and we started to get so sick of it that by the time senior year rolled around, I don't think we went over to Cornell at all. So, 13 years later, we'll see how it goes next Friday.

One week after that, we're heading down to New Jersey to stay with friends who snagged us tickets to see Spamalot, so it's the month o' entertainment for us. Though with TiVo and Netflix and memberships at the local theatre (with an 're' not an 'er'!), it's always the month of entertainment for us. It's just a more pure, concentrated form of entertainment when you pay over $30 or $100 per ticket.

I'm steeling myself to go back upstairs and face TurboTax.

As expected, we'll owe big this year. That's the price one pays for doing instant turn-overs of cheap stock options so one will have the cash on hand to go on vacation to Hawaii. Luckily, we anticipated the government's desire to anally rape us for their cut, so we put half of the money away. Turns out it might not even be as bad as I expected... I would know already if Merrill Lynch had seen fit to put all the info I actually needed on my 1099 form, which makes it look like all we did was get free money. We did have to pay something out for the initial shares, which, when entered in our 1040, will bring down the amount we owe by a few hundred bucks. I'll take it.

So today is St. Valentine's Day, that most hated of "holidays" by men the country over, as we confirm our inability to be sensitive to the needs of our womenfolk.

See, right there, I just called that female entire gender "womenfolk," solidifying my insensitivity. Sigh.

Last year was probably the best Valentine's day eve since the wife and I were in New York City for the evening to watch the Tony-winning masterpiece of stagecraft and musical comedy that is Avenue Q. It was truly a wonderful night, despite having to be in NYC for it and one we try to duplicate yearly. Not with the same play though (duh). In 2003 we saw the first Broadway version of Little Shop of Horrors. Next month we'll be down south again to partake of a little something called Monty Python's Spamalot, the musical based on Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Which actually opens officially on Broadway tonight, but we couldn't get tickets for then, and we're lucky to have tickets at all. (I don't know why we didn't start doing this years ago.)

Still, Valentine's is today, and there's nothing going on but finishing taxes. The wife and I will make a nice pesto chicken dinner and watch some TV (24 and Medium) and retire early (before midnight -- it's a school night). It's pretty much like almost every holiday that doesn't involve unwrapping big gifts. Which we'd probably do too, but neither of us got around to buying anything for each other as yet... though I am pledged to get her the finest sub-$100 waffle iron money can buy. I look forward to many a morning of Homer Simpson's Space-Age Out-of-This-World Moon Waffles in my future. (Hmmmm....waffle run-off....)

Hooray, it's tax day! the day when the wife -- whom I call Squanto! -- and I run around like crazy, trying to think of anything we can that would serve as deduction enough to keep the government monkey off our backs. We won't beable to this year. I think there will be little doubt, once we calculate in all the stock options I exercised, that we made more money in 2004 than any year in the history of our lives. Sadly, even tho I'm rich as Midas, I didn't do much in the way of, how you say... "giving." Unless you count Xmas presents. If we could deduct those, then the frickin' government would owe me big.

I'm heading back to the gym at the ol' alma mater today for the first time in... I think it's been eight months. I really have no memory of the last time I was there, to be honest. Hopefully they'll let me in -- they aren't known for checking the IDs to thoroughly up there. Which is good, as I'd rather not pay my admittedly cheap yearly fee until next payday. (Because I'm lazy and don't want to go online and take the extra two minutes to transfer money from my savings account to cover the check. I disgust even myself, people.)

It's been a productive day for a Monday, which is traditionally my day to feel like a complete sloth. I find it hard to rev up the old brain meat after a weekend of being, well, sloth-like. (For example: This weekend I shopped for gifts for a two year old, then gave said gifts to the two-year old, ate the two-year-old's cake, and made him laugh like a ninny by shocking him on the forehead with built up static electricity. Even when I put snow on the back of this kid's neck, he laughed. Griffith men are hearty stock, immune to cold and electrocution. At least at that age.)

I was up at a decent hour and put out the recycling on the "curb," though we don't really have curbs out here in the sticks where I live. I did five loads of laundry over the course of the day, simply amazed at how much clothing two people can wear in the course of a week. I even played with the dogs during the zenith of the day's warmth (unseasonable high in the mid-40's today).

Underlying all this throughout was the knowledge that my friend Bill has been in the process since about 6am of getting to a plane in Baltimore that will take him to Germany, then to Kuwait, and then on into the city of Baghdad, Iraq. Bill -- an original member of Squished Frog Productions before we even called it that -- is a major in the United States Army. And it's his year to go. Assuming it's just a year and they don't force him into another at this time next year.

If there's an upside, it's that he'll likely get combat pay while he's there (I hope) and that he's to be stationed at a location near the west side of Baghdad in or near the former Saddam International Airport that the US took over in the invasion. Bill told me last night when he called to say good-bye that he'll be working out of one of Saddam's former palace's, where all the generals are working (maybe it's even this palace ?). I hope he gets to take a dump in the former dictator's solid gold toilet.

All day it has stayed with me that he'll be there. Bonny and I talked about this all through dinner -- what it'll be like for him to get there, to live there, what he'll eat. Bill says it will be like Groundhog's Day -- 7 days a week of doing the same things over and over and over.

Mostly we wondered how his family copes. He's left his wife and kids -- a brood that has grown to seven as of this past December -- before to go to bad places. In the army since 1992 (and he was ROTC before that) he's been to Somalia and Panama, and I think others, during skirmishes there. I'm embarrassed that I don't know for sure.

Of course it all seems different to me now. More real. I'm closer to it because I'm more informed of this war than any other in my lifetime. I was too young for Vietnam and to absorbed in college during the first Gulf War. Even knowing Bill was over in conflicts during the 1990's I didn't think to much about it... they all seemed so small. Like they weren't real enough to have an impact. For that, I feel like I owe Bill and apology, though he'd tell me not to be an idiot about it.

I'm afraid throughout this year I'm going to be an idiot every time I hear about another bombing or insurgent attack -- let alone those stupid freak transport accidents that seem to happen to the damned armed forces all the time, killing people before they've even gone into combat, I think they bother me even more.

I can only imagine how his family feels.

I wish him well, hope that I'll be able to hear from him now and again (if they'll let him use his new laptop to go online), and I hope that the worst thing that happens to him is that he's bored by the repetition of it all day after day. It's not a good place to live for " interesting times ."

The worst thing that should happen to him is running out of toilet paper while he's crapping in one of Saddam's 24 karat thrones.

Three weeks later than I'd hoped, I finally shot my Survivor audition tape today. The hold up was, I don't have a tripod and the wife wasn't able to go outside and hold a camera up until now due to her surgery. But hey, with seven whole days to the deadline of submitting, there's no time like a Friday.

I decided to do it with little planning to make it seem more down to earth, out in the back yard, in the snow. We did about seven takes, four of which I just flubbed by running out of anything to say, two that were blah (one where I grimaced to much according to Bon the camera-gal), and one that seems just right. We're going to try more in the morning when the light is better as well, and decide which one to send in then.

We talked about what it would be like if I were to actually make it on the show (chances are better to be kidnapped and anal probed by aliens), wondering how she'd manage the dogs for seven weeks without me, if my company would let me take a leave that long so I could come back to work (doubtful). It was fun, like having a lottery ticket in hand the night before the big drawing, wondering.

Luckily my wife is a great editor and she also read my Survivor applications and noticed that one of the questions I answered I completely misunderstood and my answer made no sense. So I reprinted that page and filled it out again. My application has a different color ink on every page, making it obvious I took me like a month to fill out, each time with a different pen in hand.

I realized also -- being a technological genius -- that my digital camera does have a video out so I can shoot a video on that and transfer to VHS for the Survivor submission, and still have a digital version of my antics to show here. But I won't post it until March... by that time I should know for sure whether I'm going any further in this, as the producers discretion. Here's hoping. Maybe I'll buy a lottery ticket while I'm at it. And watch the skies for UFOs...

I try to use letter openers, I really do. I have like four cheapy ones -- barely as sturdy as a plastic knife -- that I have placed strategically in mugs holding pens that are in my office and the kitchen of the house (where most mail is sorted and piled before we recycle it as needed). I even have a couple of electric mail openers around here some place, though they suck.

So explain to me why I still feel the need to open envelopes by sliding my index finger below the sealed flap? Last week I did that and sliced the paper into my skin just above the knuckle on the back of the finger. I proceeded to bleed like I was filled with anti-coagulants.

And then, today, I did the same thing -- and sliced right into the same spot. There's blood all over the place as I type this. So, lesson for the day: opening mail is dangerous for many reasons in this age of mail-bomb terrorism, but nothing hurts worse or makes you feel dumber than a paper cut.

Just before New Year's, I found a body next to my mail box, that of an adult female white-tail deer. It had been struck by a vehicle traveling down our road (speed limit: 55MPH plus whatever you want since there's never any cops on it). I could tell this was true based on all the little bits and pieces of car that were strewn along the shoulder of the road, the obvious remnants of a plastic bumper and headlight and all else you'd find on a today's little toy cars.

I called the village office and was told that they couldn't help me because I'm technically in the "town" of Lansing—though my mailing address is Ithaca. Whatever. Turns out to get someone to pick up such a carcass was all a county matter anyway. I called the Tompkin's County highway department and got some voice mail, and left a message telling them where to find the victim.

This was all late on January 30, so the body was left to putrefy next to the mailbox for four days over the holiday weekend (luckily for my nose it wasn't August and 85 degrees). A couple of times I went down to the mailbox to put stuff inside to mail out, and I swear it appeared that the body had shifted a little each time or that the fur was different or even missing —though it really had not changed. It's one of those tricks that dead things play on the living, to make you question your non-belief in otherworldliness.

Today when I got the mail, the deer was gone. The only evidence of the animal's untimely death was some crushed down grass and the plastic bumper parts still on the shoulder of the road.

The Wife—whom I call Switchback Squanto!—told me earlier this week that not long ago she'd been stuck in traffic behind the truck that travels around the county and picks up the decaying roadkill. She watched as two guys had pulled out a 100+ pound deer body by the legs and heaved it into the back of a large dump-truck sized vehicle, tossing it like you would a small child into a pool or lake on a lazy summer day.

I had mentioned to my brother the cop that I'd called the highway department and he'd sagely said they'd be out after the weekend to get it, and he was right. So it's obviously something rural police have to deal with calls about. There's not much I can find online in a cursory search about this job of roadkill removal, and nothing at all locally. I've been wondering though: Who picks it up? County government employees? Freelancers, contracted for pickup and disposal? How do they dispose of them? Burial? Cremation? Dog food factory? Seems like an awful lot of work for bodies that would usually just go back to the soil if they hadn't had the idiocy to walk in front of a fast moving metal and plastic beast that could obviously take them in a fight.

I have been thinking about this a lot for the last few days in the back of my mind, and I've realized tonight that I really don't want to know much more. I'll just sit back and be happy I live in a civilized world where there are people willing and able to do the dirty work the rest of us are too squeamish to consider.

I've been curmudgeonly saying bad things about 2004 over the last few days. When the topic of the New Year has come up I've said things like, "begone, ye epoch of eee-vil!"

Though I'm not sure why. Outside of the election's results, it was a pretty good year. So here's my quick, off-the-top-of-my-head list of all the great stuff that came out of aught-four.

Great vacations:

One thing on TV that did make me cry was watching the documentary on HBO called Shelter Dogs. It was an amazing piece of work about an "upstate" New York animal shelter and the trials it goes through. I recommend it highly. Nothing I hadn't heard before, of course, but the focus they had on a doberman brought up deep memories of the dobie we fostered several years ago and how hard it was for me to give the big lug up. So I wasn't crying much about the show, more about that handsome pup we called McBain, who used to eat socks and vomit them up whole, who once ate an entire case of microwave popcorn, who put fear into the hearts of all the people who saw him -- people he would have gladly knocked down and kissed. I haven't seen him in eight years. He's probably not alive now. But he always will be in my heart whenever I see a black Doberman.

Posted by Eric G. at 08:44 PM | What the--? (0)

We're closing in on the end of the year. It's the traditional time to take stock of all one has accomplished— and not accomplished— in the preceding 365 days.

But screw that. I'll take stock in March or something.

Right now, I've got to fit in three more days of total relaxation. I mean, I could really get used to this. I wish my wife would have surgery every year at this time, giving me an excuse to go no where and do nothing.

Well, next to nothing. I do have to fluff her pillows and make her lemon tea and do all the laundry on top of my usual daily back-breaking duty as dish washer. But my god, it's been nice. A few entries back I complained about her not embracing her recovery properly and she felt guilty so we've watched more hours of tube than was healthy. Though, I think, still under the national average for most kids today. We're not even close to watching all we've got stored on the TiVo and on DVD in the cabinet (Hellboy and Firefly... good times.) (But when the hell am I going to watch all these Looney Tunes on DVD?)

My version of doing nothing is very busy, as I'm trying to cram in as much entertainment as possible. In the last week I read not only the comics I was saving (not Cerebus yet though) plus a few novels (I finished Strange & Norrell, huzzah!), and I got the wife to read the entire print run of Strangers in Paradise. I've got pictures of her reading it and smiling to prove it. It only took me about five years of cajoling her about these books and she finally acquiesced. Perhaps it helps that she was captive in the house and high on pain killers.

I supposed her recovery isn't all about my entertainment. She's also doing very well, no longer sick or sore or anything. A couple more weeks of rest (she's off until Jan. 17) and she should be good as new. Better, actually. Oh my, yes.

There is a lot to do in the next three days, however. I want to install at least one of the two ceiling fans I got for Xmas in the upstairs bed rooms that need them. One is a replacement for an ugly-ass kid's ceiling fan in rainbow colors, so if you want the old one, let me know, its free to the first person who asks. I also need to take down our fake Xmas tree and all the lights outside (ladder fun!). I need to change the oil in the tractor and the snow blower while the weather is warm (the tractor won't start easily below 20 degrees). I want to upgrade the CBLDF.org site to the latest MovableType software to combat the comment spam over there. Etcetera.

And if I don't get to it, well, la dee da, I'll have done something more important, that is to say, virtually nothing at all.

This is the strangest Xmas Eve of my life. With the annual orgy of material-goods goodness (AKA holiday gift exchanging) over last weekend, there's no anticipation here, no last minute buying, and thus nothing to look forward too.

Except for our breakfast plans tomorrow—pancakes and bacon. Excellent.

Remember when I said Bon was having a good recovery? I'd spoken too soon. All that was typed before the 36 hour wave of nausea and vomiting hit. We think the sickness was caused by the pain meds and antibiotics. They kept her safe from infection, but also kept her from ingesting anything more than two pieces of toast in that time. Once we got the doc's permission to take her off them and got some anti-nausea pills that cost $160 for four pills (we didn't pay that, thanks to our high-quality U.S. medical insurance, so take that, Canada), she got her appetite back fast and has progressed quickly from oatmeal to home-made chili and kettle chips.

I've taken the time while she's been napping to do some much needed cleaning in my basement office. I hadn't vacuumed in a couple of months...I usually wait until the dog hair dust bunnies can bark. I've been organizing some comics that need to be filed. Some still need to be read, too. It's good stuff that I saved: the entire run of Stray Bullets (some of it I've read but not all), the color graphic novel of Jack Staff and the B&W volumes of Kane (all by Paul Grist), various reprints of the later Grendels. And maybe Cerebus if I can bring myself to dive into the final issues.

I've actually been kind of annoyed with my wife during this recuperation time. She could be using this time to read all sorts of stuff... but she has no interest. She could be watching tons of movies, but it's been a challenge to get her to watch even the dumbest crap I've recorded on the TiVo (she called Steve Martin's Cheaper by the Dozen physically painful to watch... hard to argue that.)

I've got the next nine days off to play nurse maid, and I intend to watch every unwatched DVD in the house (the entire season of Firefly awaits), even if I saw the films in theaters (Hellboy! Two-thirds of The Lord of the Rings!), more crap on the TiVo (Sylvia, Wonderland, some Peter Sellers films) and more books and comics.

Even though I haven't had surgery and I'm not sick, I'll show my wife how to properly recover no matter what it takes.

The wife is home for her convalescence. So far, this is pretty damn easy. She's able to do just about everything for her self (I feared the worst for the bathroom... for better and for worse only goes so far until someone is in a nursing home).

All I have to do is cook. Which has so far consisted of making her a slice of toast. My mother-in-law is also here and they're chit-chatting away, so Bon's not bored with me yet. Since I have to work tomorrow and Thursday, she won't get a chance to be bored with me until Xmas Eve, which won't feel like Xmas eve to us since we already had our holiday last weekend. To me, the season's greetings are over, it's time for season's sitting around.

I'm sitting here in a funk, vacillating between melancholy and rage.

Not that I have much to complain about, my life is great, I'm healthy and got money in the bank and blah blah blah, but I've had a week of little annoyances and grievances and they're starting to fester in my brain and piss me the hell off. And the stupid crap, both self-inflicted and external, always seems to happen in clusters.

Little things like annoying comment spam and shit-bird trolls on my blog got things off to a good start. Trolls are the douche-bags who pop in to a site, anonymously insult the proprietor and then bail, hoping to get a rise... may they all have the fleas of a thousand camels lay eggs in their armpits.

I went down to Time Warner earlier this week to turn in its craptacular DVR and was told I couldn't close my account because I still had a cable box outstanding. Which was utter nonsense, as I didn't have one. I told them this repeatedly and pointedly, making sure they understood that this was their mistake, not mine—I never had another cable box.

Of course, this morning I found that unused cable box on a shelf in my basement utility room.

(Also, please note people, that even a craptacular DVR is better than watching TV the old fashioned way. I guess, however, there's no convincing some people people no matter how much I evangelize... such people still just enjoy writing paper checks and reading ink-stained newspapers and churning their own butter and turning the cranks on their Model-Ts, I guess.)

Last night I put on my suit and got out of the house to go to the Ithaca College yearly holiday party, held at the McMansion that the college president lives in (on the college's dime) and found it an overcrowded exercise in wondering what the hell I was doing there. (Free booze, though.)

I've cranked up the Visa debt for the holidays, cramming in all the shopping so we can do Xmas with the families this weekend, a week earlier than the actual holiday, all to accommodate the Wife having surgery on Monday morning. This will be followed by a month of recovery time, during which I will be her house slave. (Hopefully she'll sleep 90% of the time so I can finish reading Strange & Norrell.)

Whenever the holidays come around and I only budget for gifts, it's inevitable that something else comes along that needs immediate paying for. Case in point: we took our much hated Subaru Legacy Wagon into the shop this morning for a 90k mile tune up— which was already ridiculously expensive at around $600— and found out that it's got three different oil leaks in the engine. So crank that bill up to $2k. Nice.

It's just been that kind of week.

Only the agonized screaming of the little people gives me the solace I need to get through the day.

Survivor's time with us may be fleeting. The show that I raved about back in the summer of 2000 to anyone that would listen just finished what I think is its ninth season, but the ratings for the finale were the lowest of any Survivor ending show... even lower than the one Rosie O'Donnell hosted (shudder).

Tho it's still a winner for CBS it probably only has a shot at a few more seasons, and thus it's time to put myself on the line: This afternoon, I filled out the application for Survivor X. Now I need to shoot a video, and luckily I've got the technology. I will make the Wife help me shoot it out in the snow over the weekend, and get this puppy in the mail.

I need to get my passport updated to be eligible, so there's $55 I need to mail out. TANSTAAFL , as a wise man on the moon once said.

I'll miss Palau... with my luck, the season after that, to film next summer, will be the first time they try to do the show in the Arctic.

So far, so good. I'm sitting now in the JetBlue terminal at JFK, home of a terminal-wide free hotspot and the best new airline in years. I think I like SouthWest better -- first (and last) time I flew with them, the entire flight attendant crew was like a comedy team entertaining the passengers, which was a nice change -- but JetBlue gets my thumbs up most of the time. Can't go wrong with DirecTV at every seat. Though only one major network, that's just a tease.

Also, nice that they only put the outlets designated for laptop use on the most uncomfortable bench seats in the whole terminal. Smart way to make sure they don't get used too long. At least, that's how it worked in my case.

On the 5.5 hour red-eye, I only got about an hour of sleep. The rest of the time I coughed and read Strange & Norrell (Strange has just left Norrell's magical tutelage, and what's the deal with the thistle-down haired man's plans?) and watched an old episode of Detroit Animal Cops on Animal Planet without the sound. And an ancient Happy Days on TVLand that I all but convinced myself was an episode of Love, American Style because of the way Tom Bosley was dressed, he didn't look like he was in the 50's at all, but then there was Richie and Joanie and all was right with the world of reruns.

Three more hours and I'll finally board the flight to Syracuse, fly for an hour, then drive for an hour. It's almost as many hours of travel as I had on the way out with the missed connection, but feels so much nicer because it was planed ahead of time. Not that much nicer, but close enough for jazz.

Time to buy a Krispy Kreme.

Great Goggaly-Moogaly!

It's Zachary T. Paleozogt in plastic. I'm not going to explain to you people why, just accept the fact that I MUST HAVE THIS. Put this at the top of my Xmas list, ASAP people. Buy it here.

The blog comment spammers have finally found Squished Frog and embraced it. I'm both annoyed and relieved. Annoyed because now I have to combat them, but relieved that they consider my modest ramblings worth of their automated postings which desperately try to get their sex/drug/casino sites higher up on the Google listings. I wonder if the volume will stay low enough for me to delete them individually for a while... i hope so, at least long enough for me to install MovableType 3.1, which is way overdue anyway.

Speaking of spam, in three months the wife and I will be off to NYC to see our third Broadway play in three years (following Little Shop of Horrors and Avenue Q) -- the new SpamAlot, which is based on Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Starring Hank Azaria (he does voices on the Simpsons) and David Hyde Pierce (Frasier's brother Niles). Sweet. I especially like that we're seeing all of these shows with the original cast, sometime while they're still in "previews."

I'm once again in northern California, the third time in three years, and on the east coast at least I'm 35 years old. Here in sunny but frigid (what the hell is up with that?) CA, I've got another hour-plus.

I wish I could say the trip out was unremarkable, but it took me 13 full hours to get here from the moment I left my house to the landing gear hitting the tarmac at San Jose Airport. Because of weather, they kept the plane on the ground for an extra hour in Syracuse so when I got to Chicago for my layover, the connecting plane was long gone. So I was put on standby for the next plane to San Jose, which was, of course, one concourse over. This always happens in Chicago—you never land in the same place you're supposed to again take off from. It happened on the way to and from Hawai'i. I've come to expect it of O'Hare Airport. And I still like it better than Dulles.

So, I waited for an hour at the gate for someone to show up so I could confirm that I was going to get on, all the while reading Strange & Norrell, which I can say is enjoyable, but goddamn, it's the heaviest book I've ever read. And I don't mean that metaphorically. It's 780 pages and I think they were printed on cardboard. As I waited, the screen behind the desk at the gate went blank. I went and checked the departures board and, yes, they changed the gate due to a delay, so I had to again go to the other concourse.

There, I waited another three hours to find out that the plane was full. They said I was on automatic standby for the next flight to San Jose— which, oh, is in half an hour. They didn't tell me that, I found it while taking what I thought could be a leisurely stroll to—you guessed it—the other concourse.

This plane I got on. That's when my semi-dormant cold decided to kick in and play out in stages. First came the runny nose. I was blowing it every 5 minutes, much to the disgust of the man sitting next to me on the aisle. His constant shifting and sidelong glances made me want to grab his sweater sleeve and wipe off. Then, that stopped, and the sore throat kicked in. I skipped the pretzels (no meal on the super-cheapo United coach class apparently) and went for the ice.

Finally, about an hour before landing, my left ear started to ache—maybe the worse I've had since I was 11 and took my first plane ride to Florida to see my grandparents. That was a doozy but it had a gaggle of hot stewardesses (we could call them that back then) surrounding me, filled with pity and trying to soothe my aches. This ear ache I had to suffer in silence like a man. I wanted to cry. Try as I might, I couldn't equalize, blowing my nose did nothing, chewing gum, yawning, all the tricks, nothing made it better. Not until we touched down and the pressure equalized.

An hour later, after I got my rental car and checked in to my hotel to find I'd been set up by our most excellent events coordinator to get a mini-suite room, I blew my nose again.

And I swear to god, my left eardrum exploded and started to ooze down my lobe onto my cheek. At least, that's what it felt like. The pop was enormous, the pain was like a sharp pencil jammed in there and twisted. Luckily, it didn't last long. The pain fell away and that was that. I was in California.

This was hardly the worst airport experience of my life. That was the 16 hour trip last year to Oregon through Dulles. I'd rate this as worse than the 8 hour wait for a plane in San Juan Airport though, because at least there I was with the Wife (whom I refer to as... Squanto!). She's back home dealing with her pain-in-the-ass job and the three idiots all by herself and I'm sitting here turning a new age that officially puts me closer to 40 than to 30. I'd almost forgotten about it until I was on the phone with my Mom tonight and she wished me a happy. She probably remembers it only because of the pain it caused her in 1969. Here's hoping when I climb on the red-eye tomorrow night that I don't remember my b-day of 2004 for the same reason. Though I'll take the sinus pain over passing a human being through my system.

Okay, so it's the end of the week, and I haven't posted any more Why I Am Better Than You entries. One reason is because, well, it's been the holiday, and I had to drive six hours in many directions to have two different meals (hey, that's a WIABTY™ right there!), and then my wife —whom I call Squanto—got sick with a nasty-ass cold just in time for her birthday, so I have been playing nurse maid (another WIABTY™!) and then I came over all Xmas-y and decided to decorate the entire front porch of the house with lights and finally put some ornaments on our brand new faux-tree that has all the lights built in—and it rotates, which is cool. Though not fast enough to send anything flying off it. It's a Martha Stewart brand tree we picked up last month, fresh from the "Big K," as the kids call it today. Or maybe that's the corporate marketers.

I'm not sure why I bother. No one in my family usually sees any of these decorations. Though my parents did stop out yesterday for a short time while out Xmas shopping. But they only did that so they could get a copy of our Xmas Wish Lists, because they'd left their copies at home. And Dad forgot to go look at the tree, so now he wants video of it to see next weekend, when I go out to their house for another Thanksgiving meal. In the (hopefully) completed kitchen from hell, that is now looking quite heavenly.

It's all just more time for me to corrupt my nephews.

Really, I haven't posted a WIABTY™ because I haven't been able to really come up with anything that makes me super-special over anyone else. I got nothing.

Actually, I had one, all about how I'm never late for anything and hate that so many people are, something I was conditioned for in high school and college by knowing so many people who were never on time for any thing. However, a couple of years ago, just before I moved back to NY I spent a lot of time with two friends of mine that I wouldn't exactly call punctual (unless it involves a deadline), and I found it in myself to embrace the occasional bit of lateness. So that nixed that.

Squanto would have appreciated an entry on punctuality, since that is one of her strong suits (and makes her damn sexy. ) Even more she would have appreciated it because she felt the last two WIABTY™s were directed at her specifically, even though they were not. My goal is to make everyone who doesn't do them feel bad, not just her.

She apparently felt that it was personal enough that she went with me last Wednesday to give blood and it turned into a fiasco. She wasn't able to get any blood out even though the phlebotomists sat there jiggling the needle protruding from her vein in hopes of breaking the dam in her vein. In the end, they only got about 5 ounces of blood out of her, and they need 40 or some such to be able to use the bag. So in the end she was in pain, and had wasted her time. Afterwards, we barely spoke to each other for a while as I felt terrible, but couldn't bring myself to apologize... what kind of message does that send? "I'm sorry you tried to do something selfless and nice?" But at the very least she won't have to worry about me bugging her to go to the blood bank ever again. Her body obviously doesn't want to give up the goods.

She told me her theory is that she got her current mega-cold by giving blood. I tried to tell her that getting an arm swabbed with copious amounts of iodine probably help kill the cold, but I wasn't believing my own bullshit anymore than she was.

The rest of the week I've spent finishing listening to a book on tape (Skinny Dip) started back in early October—it took a while, as Squanto and I were listening to it together, so I would only play it while we were traveling together. I also finished the single-player campaign in HALO 2. The reviews were right, it is a short game, but I think it ended at exactly the right time for me to not lose interest in it. Though killing the final 'boss' monster was ridiculously easy, I have to say. I watched a couple of DVDs (Elf and The United States of Leland... the former actually has a more believable ending).

And tomorrow, I'm off to San Jose, California for the twice (sometimes thrice, but hopefully not again) Wi-Fi show. Rest assured I won't be late for that... much as I'd like to, I'm a paranoid about never missing a flight, so my punctuality will be back for at least the airport trips.

The problems with distractions is, if you don't let them distract you and get just it over with, other distractions come along and sit next to them.

And by distractions, I mean forms of entertainment.

I was talking to my friend Josh this morning and he asked me:

JOSH: hey did you finish Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell yet?
ME: uh... no.
ME: I haven't STARTED it yet! It stares at me from the shelf every night, shaming me! "why did you buy me a month ago," it says "if you weren't going to read me immediately?"

And the book is right to be ashamed of me.

Books are like my crack cocaine, I have to buy them, they're an addiction. But I'm no better with movies and video games. They must be my black tar heroin.

By my count, just walking around my house this morning, I have the following:

I swear, when I saw this, I almost felt my eyes fill with tears... of joy.

Look at it—there, that graphic— that simple set of numbers and letters in a grid. Do you know what it represents? DO YOU?

I'll tell you what it means. It is the end to the tyranny over me by the worst user interface since Microsoft Bob. It means that soon, very soon, after parting with a little money and dealing with some installation hassles, after nearly two years of suffering at the hands of Scientific Atlanta's incompetence and TimeWarner's stinginess and desire for control—and all because I'm too spoiled to give up recording two channels simultaneously—I'll be reunited with... TiVo.

For those who haven't been following this saga for the past two years, here's why this is important: When I lived in MA, I had wanted TiVo so I could enter the world of digital video recording, granting me the power of a GOD over what was on the tube. And lo, when I got a DirecTV dish and a DirecTiVo unit, it did indeed granted me those powers and more, with an interface crafted from the finest pixels by geniuses of the highest digital caliber. We lived in this bliss for a year.

Then, we moved to Central NY. We were told we could have our DirecTV satellite, which would allow us to have our dual-tuner TiVo —but if we did, we could not have our local television networks. DirecTV would not support them in our new home.

Strange as it may seem, I still watch the vast majority of my programming from the networks (LOST anyone? Gilmore Girls? Arrested Development? I'll give up a kidney before I give up these programs! And back then there was Buffy and Angel still on, too!). So, obviously, this was unacceptable. After a few months of wrangling with the network affiliate in Syracuse, trying to get waivers so I could get the network feeds on my DirecTV account, I gave up, cashed it in, and jumped back to cable.

The upside to this: my local TimeWarner service had started using digital cable, and the cable box had a DVR built in, and it would record two shows simultaneously. Just like DirecTiVo!

The downside: It was like going from using a Macintosh back to a sliderule, interface wise. The problems run from having to jump back to the beginning of shows after recording stops to not having adequate "Season Passes" to a few other annoyances. But we've lived with it for almost two years.

Hated it and cursed it, but lived with it.

All the while, my dual-LNB DirecTV dish has remained poised on the side of my house, staring to the southern sky, awaiting the day it would again be put into use.

Tonight, finishing up (finally) my tech edit on a book for Pearson Publishing, I read one of the chapters discussing using satellite signals for TV and I thought, what the hell, I'd look on DirecTV.com and see if the local channels are finally available. I held no hopes for such and outcome. But a watched pot never boils, and apparently an unmonitored media service occasionally delivers what you want if you stop asking for it. For there was a channel listing of the local networks I could get if I signed up now for DirecTV (still no UPN, but I'll live with that.)

So, over the course of the next week, I have to buy myself a new DirecTiVo unit, call up DirecTV to get service reinstated, hope that the dish is still pointing at the satellite, and turn off my TV cable without turning off my cable modem. All moves that are totally worth the time and effort and money to bring back in my hands the elegant hour-glass shaped remote that will make TiVo once again a part of my life.

Where does the time go between posts on this blog? You'd think that when I can post almost every day while on vacation in an exotic island locale that barely offered me the sanity of broadband, I could pull it together enough to write something while I'm home, spending nine or ten hours a day in front of the dual LCDs that are my window to the outside world.

Well, you can blame this delay on Microsoft. Again. Only this time, instead of my time being sucked away trying to fix the company's easily broken OS or e-mail application, I've been sucked into the one thing they always seem to get right: HALO!

Yes, HALO 2 is out on the Xbox. It's been the constant topic of discussion between Joe and I as we plan future gaming ventures on our Xbox Live accounts (killing Tom Clancy's terrorists in versions of Rainbow Six is, sad to say, getting old). My brother, still obsessed with the original HALO to this day—he's just as likely to be playing that during the day as changing soiled, smelly diapers on his sons—will likely be joining us. All because on the big release day on Tuesday, the day $100 million flowed to the coffers of Redmond, WA, I was able to plunk down my $140 bucks for two copies of the game (one for the bro plus an Xbox Live starter kit. It's early Xmas... he'll get nothing under the tree this year and like it. Okay, very little. Okay, a little less than normal.).

I'm glad I didn't go out at midnight that morning for the sale at EB World like thousands of others. I'm not that hard core, though I was afraid I wouldn't be able to get a copy at all that day after the marauding teens got all theirs. But— much like I did when the last Harry Potter book came out —I walked into Target around 11am and found about 25 copies on the shelf. Plus, I snagged the last of the free strategy guides they were giving out, as well.

I think the proper term to use toward aforementioned marauding teens who got their copies 11 hours early, for all the difference that makes is: psych! Suckers. You kids is stoo-peed.

Meanwhile, the game, like other first-person shooters before it, permeates my thoughts like Tidy-Bowl does toilet water. I've got the strategy guide by my side so when my computer is doing something that takes a while (like, say, opening a blank document...) I can quickly look up some tidbit to help me out later. I've skipped my usual ritual of the Daily Show at lunch to instead wolf down left over chili and get right back into a half hour of killing Covenant grunts before I go back to work. And as soon as I'm done typing this, I've got to strap on my ray gun for a couple more hours.

And this is just the single-player campaign folks... I've got untold hours of multi-player goodness to get out of this game too, just as soon as Joe get his pre-ordered copy from Amazon, probably sometime next week. Sad for him.

Enough of this. Time to go kick some virtual ass. For those of you only with PS2 or GameCube... I pity you.

This past weekend I attended a wedding of friend's Brett and Kerry back at the old homestead. Nuptials/reception were actually held at the quite lovely Lake Lodge outside of Alfred, where my brother is known as The Law.

Anyway, it was nice as I got to sit at a table with my friends from HHS, watch another friend have a very funny wedding ceremony (pictures here) and eat some good food.

We had a couple of seats open at our table of eight. Over to the table to say hello to my friends Mark and Bill comes Kathy, who, at a year older than me, looks about 12 years my junior. I have no idea what time machine wrinkle cream she's using, but even after having two kids, she looks exactly like she did the day she graduated high school. It's unbelievable.

I'm watching her talk to Mark and Bill, wondering when I should say hi, and realize quite suddenly in my head: she has no idea who the hell I am.

Mind you, she and I were in theater productions together for several years. This woman was my date to my junior prom. She went on dates with me and one of my best friends at the same time and he and I had a very 16-year-old mind-blowing talk about that when we realized it back in 1986... neither of us had conceived up to that point that women play the field, too! (Had I only been as good at that as she...)

I haven't seen her since the summer of 1989 when she won a plastic frog at the Hornell Fireman's Carnival that became the first "squished frog" that Bill, Brett and I ever immortalized on film (we hit it with a bat, I think... or maybe we drove over it? I forget).

Finally, she sat down, she looked over at me, put her hand out to shake and introduced herself.

And I did the same, and I think the moment she heard my voice, maybe she finally clicked to who I was.

Laughter was had all around.

Later, as I was telling the groom about this, he pointed out with far to much honesty that she was probably thinking an instant later, "Boy, did you get fat!" True. Considering that even with my Freshman 15 in 1989 I was still a few pounds lighter when she last saw me, not to mention I no longer wear the coke-bottle glasses of my pre-LASIK life, it's a wonder she would click to who I was at all.

Kathy, standing nearby as Brett said this, blamed it on the beard (only seven years old itself) which was sweet of her.

Earlier that same day, the Wife and I were shopping up at the Hornell Wal-Mart, which based on the crowds is the only place to go in town for anything, and I saw another woman I knew back then, also from the high school plays. She too, back then, had been a beauty to behold, a gorgeous creature. However, the ravages of the last 16 years seemed to be etched in her face, her extra weight, her dead eyes. She pushed a cart accompanied by a small boy, no doubt hers, and seemed to have all the energy and vivaciousness of your average Romero zombie.

She didn't recognize me at all, of course -- I swear I could walk into my own high school reunion with an uzi and mow everyone down and no one would know to tell the police was me -- which was a good thing, as I couldn't imagine having to say to her, "hey, you look... great?"

Kathy, however, did say that to me. All hogwash, but she always had the ability to make a person feel good about themselves, a trait sorely lacking in so many. Including myself.

As we left the reception, I gave Kath a quick hug and told her I'd see her again in 10 years and see if she recognizes me then. Maybe I'll have lost weight, shaved and have reading glasses... but probably I'll just have the glasses.

A smart person would probably spend what little warmth and sunlight they have left to enjoy in the calendar year of 2004 in a hammock, with a good book and an iPod filled with showtunes and a container of cornnuts to munch on.

Not me. Here's how I spent my past Saturday. Notice the wacky-ass ceiling fan up there? Yeah, that's what I did. (That's in my parent's kitchen, part of the Never Ending Kitchen Remodeling Project of Aught Four.)

At least, I helped. As my brother would say... okay, as my brother actually said—he gave his usual 110%, I gave my 50%. He might have been being facetious, but sadly, it was still true. Then again, when he starts working, everyone else looks like they're standing around with their thumbs up their ass. (At least I did have the pleasure at the end of the day to tell him that he hung a bunch of lights in the ceiling up-side-down. Take that, Mr. I -Never-Have-To-Read-The-Directions!)

That, by the way, is an all wood ceiling in the center—it's raised in the middle to accommodate the Jetson's ceiling fan. The rest will be wooded later, but we had to finish framing it out and putting in the lights.

You can't see it in the picture, but there were old fluorescent lights up in the ceiling that we had to pull out, one of which I inherited (translation: My dad didn't have any place to put it, so he put it in the back of my mini-van). That's how I spent my Sunday: I hung an 80 lb fluorescent light in my basement utility room, which heretofore was illuminated with naught but a single bulb, barely enough luminescence to prevent hitting one's noggin on a pipe. Now it's bright enough to sun bath under.

Seeing as I was already perspiring from that (a short trip for one of my stoutness, worsened by inheriting the profuse sweat glands of my ancestors), I spent the rest of the day in equally manly household pursuits. I put a table top on an antique 25-gallon crock (don't ask) and hung a bicycle with a fancy pulley system from the ceiling of my garage. Then I washed all three dogs. And folded about 200 lbs. of laundry.

Then I watched Desperate Housewives and went to bed.

And that's how I spent my weekend.

Creepy... I just got an e-mail message from my great-grandmother.

My late great-grandmother.

I know it was her, because it has her name, Edna Stevens, in the "From" box in my email.

Of course, she sent it to me and about 40 other people in my company...

And she spelled her own last name wrong (its actually "Stephens"), but I don't recall what her level of literacy was...

And she seems to be selling me Va|ium and Via-Gra and Vic0din....

But otherwise, I'm pretty sure it was her.

What is it about phlegm that just makes it impossible to swallow? I mean, you would think it would just slide right down, but instead it always seems to stick in the throat, only to get horked back up for eventual expectoration.

Obviously, I'm sick.

Not sure what happened or how I got this way, since I have little contact with the outside world in my protective, IP-based bubble here in what I call the "Fort o' Seclusion," but which my Wife calls the basement. Still, over the last 36 hours I've started to generate mucus on a scale unprecedented in my sinuses.

To fight it, today I'm going all liquid diet for the first time since the ColonBlow experiment of January. At the time I deemed the ingestion of grape flavored sawdust a dismal failure since it didn't product black sludge feces, but I have to admit, it shed a couple of pounds. Per hour. (Amazing how that works when you don't have a donut or candy-bar or brownie every few hours.) I hope that along with flushing out the bad germs, I can flush out some fat cells as well.

I'm also sucking down Zinc tablets (Cherry-flavored my ass... they taste like Elmer's wood glue) and taking Dimetapp or Comtrex or something like that. All I know is, it says "non-drowsy" on the box, which I find disappointing, as I'd like to take a nap.

Since the wife wasn't home last night, I didn't see the big wrap up of The Amazing Race -- I told her I'd wait and watch it with her. (Totally deserves the Emmy, tho hard to fathom it beating out two seasons of Survivor in a row with Rupert.) So now I can't ready any Internet news today for fear of learning the outcome ahead of time. I must encase myself in a news-less bubble. Time to turn off the RSS Reader and limit the browsing to work.

This is never going to work.

Bonny was away for about 36 hours through Tuesday night. She was in Chicago for a quick 1.5 day trip to a seminar on how to do better propaganda to trick wayward youths with excessive means into going to our old alma mater.

Monday, that was fine with the dogs --- they probably just thought she was still at work. And Tuesday, well the two bitches (not a bad word!) didn’t have much problem.

But our little boy, Caper -- he gave a new definition to the term ‘momma’s boy.’

The sulking. The forlorn looks. That morning at breakfast for the first time in his life, he actually refused to eat. At first I was worried -- I palpated his stomach looking for bloat or tumors or stones or whatever, I checked his ears and nose and throat. Finally, I lead him back to his dish and he ate a mouthful, and then walked away. I brought him back five more time and he ate most of it.

He had no problem playing when distracted but I could tell when it clicked in his brain: “Mommy still no home,” his little brain would say. Then he’d go sulk. So it’s all drama. Angst of the canine. It’s not like we don’t leave him behind other times, such as at my parent’s house when we go out of town. The difference is, this time he was stuck with me and not his precious lady-human. I try not to take it personally. After all, I have a great loving relationship with our youngest, Kylie, though in my heart I know she’s a slut and would go off with any human that paid attention to her.

I think the psychic link between lady and beast is strong, as she got sick on the plane back home and yacked into a barf bag at the same time Caper was staring through the cyclone fence in the backyard, waiting for a car to pull into the driveway.

"When it came to your writing," he said, "you blew it."

This was said to me in the early hours of this morning by my oldest friend in the world, Mark, who I have known since the seventh grade. It was nearly 4am and we and a gaggle of people had been drinking since around 8:30pm the night before, at a bachelor celebration for our mutual friend, Brett, who's giving up his legal ability to sleep around next month.

I'm so out of practice for nights like this. I'm a practiced homebody. Having usually lived far from friends and co-workers, getting together for debauchery and vomiting in smoke filled rooms (some of it was even from regular tobacco!) where beers are shoved at me like cattle prods are shoved at Abu Gharib prisoners and the most off-hand comment can contain a reference to a person's mother's sexual proclivities, it is all so far from my second nature.

Nevertheless, I had an incredibly good night right along, meeting new people (the names of almost all I promptly forgot... I need to buy a book on remembering... bur remembering what again?), reminiscing with guys from high school, talking diverse topics such as Strong Bad e-mails to acting in local theater to wireless networking (ugh), and laughing like I haven't laughed in a long time without the help of Steven Colbert.

Discussion at one point centered on my recent fiction entry here on the blog, with some impromptu psychoanalysis of me by all at the table. I think it ended with the conclusion that I'm fucking nuttier than a can from Planters. I'm sure all the great writers of psycho characters get that all the time ("Oh, Mr. Harris! Your writing makes me think that perhaps you are a cannibal! Who likes fava beans, no less!") Perhaps I need to balance my crazies with some upstanding moral heroes... or not.

The occasional female wandered into the basement room we used, though none to remove a stitch of clothing, much to everyone's consternation (we even scared one girl away with a giant woop-holler as she entered looking for a bathroom).

After we got done at the bar some of us traveled over to Sean's apartment. There was more beer there and someone dialed-up some pay-per-view porn on his TimeWarner cable account to serve as soothing background ambience for the gathering.

Sean, for those not in the know, is perhaps the most likable person on earth. Even when performing acts of pure evil—despicable acts with innocent youngsters, mind you—people want to be his friend. He told me numerous times that he's enjoyed reading my blog, especially the occasional mention of target=_blank>The Girl I was Obsessed With™ (or TGIWOW) in high school. He would find it funny, because he was dating TGIWOW at the time, which back then made me insane with jealousy. But dammit, I still wanted to be his bestest friend. Everyone did, though he claims not to see it.

So why did Mark disparage my writing? Travel to the past with me for no good reason other than to show how good the memory on my friends is:

In the summer of 1986, after a couple years of traveling down to Myrtle Beach for a few weeks of the summer with Mark and his family, in 1986 Mark's family took Sean. However, that same year, my parent's decided we should go to Myrtle Beach as a family as well. So the two families were there at the same time, and did many things together.

One of those things was to go see the film Howard the Duck. And I hated it. Suck fest. It's a film universally derided and condemned as one of the worst ever made in Hollywood, and at the time I hated it even more because I had read a couple of the classic Steve Gerber comics it was based on. Not that I really understood them... I think Howard was a bit beyond me. Still, my mistake was in articulating my dislike of the film by mentioning how small the eyes were on the Howard puppet/suit (looking nothing like he was drawn in the comic, as if that mattered), which those two fuckers never let me forget. I would never have made it on a debate team with that keen insight.

Still: Howard's a suck fest. I'll let the NYTimes review of August 1, 1986 back me up.

This point (being brought up again at 3:30 in the morning, mind you) came amid a furious argument between the three of us that consisted essentially of compliments that we denied were true. For example, Mark tried to tell Sean that he was universally loved and could run for mayor of Hornell and probably win, a premise at which Sean scoffs. Meanwhile, Sean said to me many times in the night how much he enjoys reading my hilarious and gut busting and Pulitzer worthy entries in this blog. (I'm sure those were his exact words). He said this again as Mark and I were preparing to leave, and that's when Mark said that, as for my writing career, I had blown it.

This is an insight he delivered with a drunken stagger, a smile trying to show bravado in the face of probably not even being sure if he'd said aloud what he was thinking.

Still, it was a simple, straight-forward articulation of every doubt I have about my career path of the last 16 years.

Maybe he realized the harshness of the statement—or maybe he had to pause and turn 360 degrees to the door and back again while the alcohol cleared a new neuron to finish his thought—but he turned back and told me how he came to this feeling, saying that at one time, he and Brett had discussed taking my resume and submitting it to TSR (the former publishers of the Dungeons & Dragons games).

This goes back, apparently, to our affection for our D&D games in high school, where I was the dungeon master who treated a campaign like a writer who know the beginning and the end of the story, but not any of the middle—and I let my friends in their guises of barbarians and Halflings figure that out with dice rolls and funny accents and lots of cola.

Mark thought I should have been a great writer of fantasy and science fiction (or at the very least should have made kick-ass modules for role-playing).

I worked with a guy once who freelanced for TSR, and I don't think it was pretty, so I'm kinda glad that wasn't my path.

Still, this was a compliment in the long run, delivered ( as is a tradition with my high school friends) by first being torn down before one can be built up.

I realized long ago that when it comes to creative work, you can't really trust the opinions of family and friends. Everyone who's written a story and showed it to their mom is told how great they are, unless their mom is an evil, honest shrew-lady. Friends and family are (supposed to be) biased in your favor.

Many times some people are going to be impressed by your works even when it's utter shite because it's not something they think they could do.

The only opinions that matter in the long run are those who are going to get you published/produced/hired. And once you get past the initial hurdle, the important opinions are those of the people who pay the checks. Maybe even more important are the people you work with. (I'm sure to this day my college sophomore year roommate only thinks of me with derisive disgust that I didn't keep writing comedy with him instead of spending all my time in the dining hall and sleeping with that girl I hooked up with the same year. He went on to write for Conan O'Brien and just produced a pilot for UPN. But I married that girl. )

After that, what matters is the opinion of the consumers of said "artistic product". However, getting to them is damn near impossible, and even if you do, we all know the general public is a bunch of moronic sheep anyway, so who cares what they think? (Unless they have money. Or connections. Then you'll care.)

Still, it was a great compliment to get, and one of many I recieved that night, which was nice since I've been so absent for so many years. I was telling the Wife the other night, in discussing her giving a call to a friend she's also out of touch with, that I'm realizing that after you go a while not calling someone, you start to think, "wow, they must hate my guts for not calling in so long" and then you just keep putting it off and putting it off. I'm finding that sometimes the people on the other end feel the same way, and when you finally come together, it's just a big relief for all involved.

And it's especially fun when doing Kamikaze shots and/or watching pay-per-view porn.

Besides the evils of cake, the other thing I can't shake is my need for more damn books. I'm still reading my way through the $150 shopping spree I got on BarnesandNoble.com a few months ago, have yet to read any of the books I bought at the Friends of the Library sale last summer (because I got caught up in some books I just had to get off Amazon) -- and then today, weakened by a review in USA Today, I just had to make another quick Amazon purchase (which ballooned into $43 bucks for four books in no time). (The books in question: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Hark!: A Novel of the 87th Precinct, Murder of Angels, and The Last Coyote —I need that last one before I can read any of the FotL Sale books, as I got the entire series of Harry Bosch novels except that one, the fourth in the series.)

That's not even counting the audibooks on the iPod.

This is all easily blamed on my parents, who never saw a murder mystery novel they didn't like. As a kid, one of the great things my mother and I shared was working our way through all the exisiting 87th Precinct Novels by Ed McBain, by taking them out of the library. Before that, the year after I was in 5th grade, I won an airplane ride over the Canisteo Valley through the Hornell Public Library by being one of the three kids in town to read the most books. I ostensibly read one book every day that summer, and reported on them to the librarian, who's name was Terry Howard, and even back then I knew she was one incredibly hot babe. I'd have given her a book report on anything.

As it was, to meet my personal quota of one book a day, some of those books including things like collections of Peanuts comic strips that took about an half hour to get through. At the same time, I was reading Encyclopedia Brown, books about werewolves and Bigfoot, and lots of comics (but they didn't have comics in the library then, so I couldn't give reports on them).

Every day, I rode my bike with the banana seat (colored to look like it had blue glitter sparkling under the vinyl) back and forth to the library, about 10 blocks away. To do this, I had to either go through the underpass -- which meant going about 30 miles and hour down a cement hill into a tunnel -- or crossing the railroad tracks along the abandoned depot. I usually went the latter. It's where I encountered my first homeless person, when I hit the sleeping drifter in the legs with my bike. It never occured to me then that people would sleep against the depot. He gave me a dirty look and I moved on, my backpack loaded with books. I don't think anyone can go that route anymore, as there's a grocery store and a shopping plaza where I used to ride through on my bike, even up to the time I was in high school. Hell, the trail I used to walk in that same empty stretch of land across the tracks from the depot is now being turned into an Eckerds drugs. It's depressing.

Anyway, books: my mom told me the other night that once they reclaim their dining room (now filled with all the overflow from the kitchen that's under renovation) they're giving away every book on the homemade shelves in there. She told me to take what I want, as the rest would go to the hospital, Salvation Army, whatever.

Just what I need. More books.

If only there was a hot librarian around to give my book reports. I guess I'll have to settle for just the private joy of reading them.

(Oh, an a quick mention by the way, because it's been bugging me: There's a reason why movies based on Dennis Lehane novels win Oscars, and why movies based on James Patterson novels seem to have killed Morgan "Easy Reader" Freeman's career. As the kids say, Lehane rAWks.)

I'm sitting in a hotspot (others might call it a cyber cafe) in downtown Ithaca right now, waiting for the garage to throw a new tire on Matilda. I had lunch here, and I couldn't resist, I just ponied up also for a piece of their "ultimate chocolate cake." Which was very very good. But eating it made me feel dirty. Weak. Out of control.

All good signs.

It's amazing what a false sense of security can do.

I had to change a tire again today. It's the same tire that went flat before and that two different garages could find no problem with in the past. Well, now consider that shoddy rubber ready for the fire in Springfield, USA.

Since I just changed a tire on Matilda, the mini-van, less than two weeks ago, I skipped all the things I would usually do: didn't read the manual, didn't get flustered trying to figure out how to extricate the jack, didn't spend 20 minutes trying to get the donut spare off the stupid cable mount under the vehicle. (Though I did grab the phone to take out with me like last time.)

I was flying along, changing that sucker like I knew what I was doing. Spare ready. Lugnuts loosen. Jack in place. I had the vehicle raised up into the air at about the right altitude to get the flat off, took a step back to make sure, and watched as, in slow motion, the vehicle rolled backwards just enough to fall off the jack. Said jack was left laying sideways under the side panel.

I hadn't put a chuck behind the wheels. I hadn't engaged the parking break. I had not followed the instructions. That apparently only works for other people.

I engaged the break and stuck four different pieces of 2x4 under other tires to get Matilda locked down, and started to lower the jack into place so I could use it again... and it wouldn't turn. The entire jack got bent at enough of an angle as the 2000 pound vehicle rolled it that the foot long screw that lowers and raises it was now angled and thus useless.

Christ.

Thank god I'm in my own driveway and not on the side of an Interstate.

So now, AAA has a driver on the way to come and jack me up so I can get the donut on. Instead of buying just a new tire, I need to buy a whole new jack.

I'm truly the most unoriginal procrastinator that's ever lived. I seriously want to just do some writing but instead stare at my RSS reader like a zombie, or surf around, or whatever else... I'm sitting here on my ass, why not do what I want to do? Pathetic.

I'm not sure if it’s the weather (two solid days of drizzly rain, remnants of Hurricane Frances, probably) or the knowledge that I'm firmly entrenched in September (traditionally a month of mixed anticipation and horror when I was in school... there's little to anticipate about a September now), but I'm feeling like I want to claw my eyes out and just feel the vitreous humor drip down my cheeks. I don't want to look at the walls, I don't want to smell the air freshener in the toilets, I'm sick of Siren looking at me like it's my frickin' fault that when I take them out to play the grass is so high and wet and oh, daddy, please, I'm a delicate Labrador, I can't work in these conditions! Jesus Christ, you dogs eat your own feces! Wet grass shouldn't be a hardship!

Sigh.

Okay, so I've also got a bit of freelancing I'm doing, tech editing a book on home media networks. It's not exactly the most stimulating thing in the world. And it doesn't pay much. So I've turned in almost every chapter late so far... maybe they won't pay me at all.

I should have just left the house two hours ago, gone for a walk in the rain, maybe even taken one of the idiots with me for a walk, but I'm almost physically incapable of leaving my desk before 5pm on a work day sometimes, just in case someone should call, or some "news" should break that I need to cover. This makes me a good company boy, and it's why I'm still employed as a work from home stooge. So I tell myself.

So now it's almost 6pm, the wife's still not home. I wouldn't leave before she got home either, since if I was gone and so was one dog, she'd probably freak out thinking something's wrong, and I wouldn't be smart enough to have left a message or a note to assuage her panic. Another reason to sit and stare at these hateful walls, this stupid screen, and put up with the hopeful, optimistic looks of ignored canines.

I spent the day Saturday the fourth in Hornell -- it was my Mom's birthday. Here's some snippets:

My wife (known to me only as... Squanto!) , despite several years working in technology journalism, really has absolutely no patience for computers. If they don't do what they're supposed to, and I mean right god-damn now!, then things will be slammed, curses will be hurled, and husband's had best make sure the dishes are done or there will be more hell to pay.

Thus it is that this weekend, while she's away in Massachusetts playing with her former CDL* cohorts, I will be fixing her computer. Not just running a couple of utilities and simple diagnostics though. Her PC has been running for about three years now and has kludged itself up enough that it's time to go tabula rasa on it's ass. Always scary, but so worth it in the end. The most time consuming part will be doing all the backups of data, trying desperately not to forget any documents, bookmarks, ledgers, etc.

So. I'm off for an exciting Friday night. Tomorrow a trip to Hornell for my mom's b-day (and some more kitchen remodeling work) and then hopefully by Sunday night I'll have her PC running like new again. We'll see.

*Crazy Dog Ladies

Bravest thing I did today: I installed Windows XP Service Pack 2 on my main work computer after doing very minimal data backups. Foolishness really. And this was after four days of trying to get the update to download. But I did it, it took an hour to install, and it works like a charm. First thing I did with it: turn off Microsoft's crappy built in firewall. But I like the new Internet Explorer pop-up blocker. Kinda stupid that it's not available for IE on other versions of Windows, but that's how you sell.

Most Cowardly thing I did today: I had to change a tire on our mini-van (we call her Matilda). The driver's side rear tire was flat as Ally McBeal, which the Wife found out when she drove down our driveway this morning on the rim. So, I pulled out the manual (to see what I was doing), the jack (that took 20 minutes to extricate by itself), pulled out the donut spare, and loosened some lug-nuts in preparation for jacking the vehicle up.

It was about this time I got this vision: my leg pinned under the van, crushed when the jack failed, and the car has severed my femoral artery and I bleed out on my own driveway, despite my hideously girlish screams for help that would go unheard because I have no neighbors near by. Bonny would find me about eight hours later when she got home from work, and she'd see the van in the same spot, and be royally pissed that I hadn't changed the tire, spoiling for a fight after a heard day of work, and then she'd find my pale corpse, showing remarkably little lividity underneath since all my blood flowed down the driveway into the street, but rigor mortis has begun to set in, sped along by my laying in the sun upon the clean blacktop of my driveway.

When I got that stuck in my head, I went and got the phone out of the house and put it close by the van so when-- I mean, if -- the van slipped onto me, I could at least make a call to 9/11. Assuming the pain of having my tibia and fibula crushed to power doesn't make me pass out instantly.

Somehow... I got the tire changed without incident. Matilda can be driven off to get a new boot.

It was almost disappointing, really.

Just goes to show, there's probably no such thing as a AAA guy with an active imagination.

That reminds me, I meant to give some hell to the person who stole our sign.

Signs proclaiming "Bush Must Go!" have been springing up all over our progressive little valley here and Squanto (the Wife) and I, being also of that particular persuasion, forked over our six bucks for a sign too. It is basically a weatherized cardboard sign that fit over top of a cheap metal frame.

We had two problems. First, there were spaces at the bottom of the sign, on each side, for putting in an extra message of disgust toward the current administration. Most in town were buying extra anti-Republican bumper stickers and putting them in the slot. We were cheap, and wrote something in with a magic marker. The Squantalicious One decided on this saying: "A Village in Texas is Missing Its Idiot!"

We tried to put this down by the end of our drive way to no avail -- the ground was so rocky that the frame couldn't get embedded enough to hold the sign up. One day, the Wife decided enough was enough, and put the sign right out on the side of the road. Technically no longer on our property -- we live about 150 feet back from a 55-mile-an-hour two-lane road, complete with county-maintained culverts and ditches, etc.

At first, having the sign out there for all to finally see, turned my stomach into knots. I had visions of Right-wingers in pick-up trucks with Molotov cocktails driving up to my house, doing donuts in my front lawn as they whooped and hollered and tossed the flaming brews at the front porch.

After a couple of weeks though, I forgot my fears and went back to my usual existence.

And then, a couple of weeks ago, while I was down getting the mail, I saw that the sign, including the metal frame, had vanished. Gone. I checked the ditch, I crossed the road to see if it had blown off, but it was simply and utterly gone.

I have no idea who took it or why. Squanto, even more paranoid than me (where my paranoia leads to fear, here's leads to anger, and thus we both embrace the Dark Side) said it was probably the people about a mile down the road from us, the only house in town that has the guts to put out a Bush/Cheney sign on their front lawn. I figure it was more likely that some municipal worker saw our sign not on private property and said "sucks for them" as he threw the sign in the back of a dump truck. I can only hope he shook his head in sadness with a feeling of solidarity our over-zealous, ditch-encroaching protest.

Part of the Griffith Master Plan for Weight Loss is to give away as much of my bodily fluid as possible.

Thus, I have been giving blood as often as I can for the last year. That translates to every couple of months, because donors have to wait 58 days in-between donations, during which time all that retched blood grows back. I'm about half way to getting my first pin, for giving up One Gallon o' Plasma.

The Red Cross sets up a remote station every two months at the Ithaca VFW on State Street, right across from the beloved and seldom visited State Diner. I've tried to be there like clockwork. It's far easier to give here than it was to even find a place near where I lived in Massachusetts. Back then, I really wanted to give (especially after 9/11) but I never did. At the time I was considering it, so was everyone else, and the donations places (an hour's drive away) couldn't handle the capacity.

Usually the 45 minutes it takes to get through the donation are pretty innocuous. First trudge up the side stairs to the second floor of the VHW, which hasn't been redecorated since the early 1960s. An ancient, battered, and I suspect un-functioning Bingo sign sits on one end, over the doors to the bathrooms.

I hand over my ID to the first volunteer at the table who marks down that I've arrived on a reservations sheet. She or he makes me sit on a metal chair and read the several page pamphlet that spells out all the reasons I would not/should not give blood: Had Hepatitis. Exchanged money or drugs for sex. Lived out of the country for more than three months. Fuck men. Got a tattoo in the last 12 months. The usual things.

I skim it, admire the pretty colors on the print outs, and go to the next station where a Red Cross staffer asks me my name, rank, and social security number. They pull up my stats from the last visit, and then print out the questionnaire. This I take to a private cubicle where I have to circle either Y or N for each query. The only Y I ever circle is the first one: "Are you feeling healthy and chipper and wonderful today?" or something like that. The rest are reiterations of the reasons not to give: Like to smoke crack out of shared needles. Had AIDS for lunch. Fuck men. Are a Republican. Etc.

I was also told this time, for the first time, that the Red Cross is very anal, and that if I circle an N, I should make sure the circle doesn't touch the Y. Must be they grade it with a computer, like the NY Regents test.

After I fill this out (but don't sign it), it's time for the stick, the prick and the pump.

First the same staffer sticks an electronic thermometer in my mouth. After growing up with glass thermometers, feeling the metal rod with the prophylactic rubber sleeve under my tongue now feels unnatural. My temp: 98.8.

Then the prick: she takes the middle finger of my right hand and rubs it down with alcohol, then uses a sterilized spring-loaded unit with a point on it break the skin on the finger. She squeezes out some blood then wipes it off, I assume to make sure it's not contaminated with rubbing alcohol. Then she squeezes more into this little plastic tube that sucks my life giving juice up like a sponge. She then puts a drop into a vial of blue liquid and watches it fall.

"You've got a high iron content," she said. With a finger motion she added, "look at it fall." She went on to tell me that most men have higher iron in their blood than women. I asked her if it was dietary, and she said she didn't know. Maybe testosterone causes iron.

Finally, the pump: she puts on the sphygmomanometer on my arm to check my blood pressure. She had to do it twice, because she couldn't hear my pulse (66) over the oldies radio station blaring in two different parts of the room. She seemed a bit worried and asked me if my usual blood pressure was like this. For a second I thought, 'here it is, hyper-dog-damn-tension, finally, after all these years.' I pictured myself clutching my chest, ala Redd Foxx. Turns out, if anything, it was low ( 114 systolic and 84 diastolic). All that clean living is finally paying