Just got back from seeing the nice man with the liquid nitrogen bottle. Not bad this time only 2 spots.

Woke up this morning to the season't 1st cold/sore throat and actual rain.

Poo to thee, Autumn!!! (Little Tom Cruise told me this was Shakespeare!)

i was making chicken soup last night, and my wife decided to start changing things in the recipe, taking things out and putting stuff in to her liking. i asked politely to stop fucking messing around with it. i was making it, trying some different techniques and tweaks to see their effects on the soup. but now, my experiments are for naught. you'd think she'd be happy to have someone cook for her.
this began a fight, much like a snowball on an inclined plane.

I always say I envy people whose spouses cook with/for them, but in truth I'm very pleased to be the sole ruler of the kitchen.

we have a 2 family house, in which we have expanded to occupy both halves, so i have my own kitchen
but that's still not good enough, grrrrrrrrrr.

Bob is having his first slump in work this week, in years. He's home a lot.

I am working on a deadline, trying to research and write three articles, which requires a lot of concentration and quiet.

But he HAS to watch this fucking program that's on RIGHT NOW, and he's forgetting to mute the fucking commercials and I feel like throwing something.

Or someone.

I'll get over it. I hate listening to commercials.

More depressing than annoying, the season of darkness begins Sunday the first day of the return of standard time.

Dumbfuck tech support guy, called in to figure out why my IMAP client isn't working, "solved" the problem by giving me direct [sic] access to our offsite Exchange server. This took him 2 hours to set up, and it doesn't work either. He keeps insisting it's a client problem. I'm convinced it's a server problem, and why are we using Exchange anyway?

I'm stuck with web mail, which is one step up from two tin cans and a string.

Gang-related shooting on my street last night. Anyone wanna come over?




Anyone?









Anyone?

my first three years in the u.s i lived down by usc at le chateau on rue portland (or as we mostly brown and taiwanese residents called it, "third world ghetto"). the beat-up house next to us was home to the dread harpies gang. my second and third year there i was in an apartment that looked out at their back entrance. my room-mate and i once saw a man getting shot there--we didn't see the shooter or the gun though (as we told the police when they showed up, and also in case any of the harpies are reading along). some of them would hang out in front of the house with golf clubs and baseball bats. as far as i know they never hassled any of the residents of our building. i don't think that neighbourhood is going to be gentrified. though it was one of the most beautiful parts of los angeles in the 40s and 50s (just off adams).

The Harpies? Did you suffer any drive-by food looting?

I hate the last Sunday in October. It's really annoying to have to get out of bed at one forty-five and disturb my neighbor's daughter just to get all the clocks reset by two. There are three computers, two TVs, a cable box, two VHS machines, a DVD machine, two travel clocks, the kitchen clock, the ones in the microwaves and the standard oven, the clock radio, the bedside alarm, the wall clocks, and my wristwatch collection. By the time I'm done, I'm wide awake and there's nothing on TV but Ron Popiel, bowflex machines, 900 number call-in ads, infomercials for natural male enhancement and wrinkle removers, and reruns of The Cisco Kid and Dick van Dyke. Thank god for my porno collection.

Getting the early decision stuff squared away for the boy.

College tuition costs for two kids at the same time. No hope of financial aid and I'm not a loan guy.

and you silly people ask why I don't eat out much anymore.

Picking up a project that was last worked on 14 months ago, before I even joined the company. Isn't there an expiration date on things like this?

A three-page rant about Con Ed bills from our housemate, handwritten in bleeding red ink.

I've had Tina Turner's "We Don't Need Another Hero" from the Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome soundtrack stuck in my head for about 3 days now. And the only lyric I know is: we don't need another heeeeeero.

Frankly, Mr. Shankly is stuck in my brain. I like the song but it's still driving me nuts.

I was walking down Rush St in Chicago last night and a shoe shine person hassled me into letting him shine my shoes. I have never had a professional shoe shine and was distressed when in addition to using his jar of polish he spit on the cloth he used to shine my shoes. I couldn't wait to get away from that guy.
As he is doing his thing he tells me he has 4 kids (i know for sure they aren't mine so i don't feel bad or responsible). At this point I didnt care whether he had no kids and wanted to buy booze or was taking care of 10 orphans - I just wanted to get away ASAP.


SF and Chicago have much more visible homeless/beggar communities than NY or LA, IMO (esp SF).

I also think that smoking should not be allowed in restaurants and bars. It was unpleasant having cigar and cigarette smoke in the room of the restaurant in which I ate in Chicago last night.

It's 6:30, Halloween night, and I've had only two kids come by, both too old to be trick or treating, and five bags of candy in a bowl.

Try living on the edge of the Castro. It's not so much 6:30 pm I'm worried about, but 3:00 am when they'll all be drunk as lords -- all 250,000 of them.

[I hate Halloween. ]

We live on a country road. We have never had a single trick-or-treater.

I bought candy in the hopes that one of the children in the building is of age, but if so they're part of the mayhem on Broadway (the Queens one, that is). Oh well--the Hershey Minatures will go to my chorale mates tomorrow.

on my way home I came upon a 5 year old Snow White, standing all alone, wailing in the middle of the sidewalk. She'd lost her family. After comforting her for a couple of minutes and telling her we'd find them her sister ran up to her and everything was fine. The annoyance? Before I got to her I watched 4 people walk right past her without a glance.

Only three trick-or-treaters, despite a perfect night for it, and the last two were (I suspect) just doing some opportunistic candy-gathering on their way home from detention at a local high school. For a "costume" they had scarves tied around their faces (perhaps they were on their way to rob a store )

Fly