![[abada abada]](newpix/abada.gif)
an occasional feature
January
![[induction coil]](99pix/indu.gif)
I am halfway through my second week of near
full
time work. I am adapting to it pretty well. Along with the
bus pass and occasional free lunch that one job
affords
me, I get the high pay of the other job, the
high status of another job
[okay, not really high status, but higher than any job
I've
had before] and the moral righteousness of another. One job is great
for its flexible hours and the ability to work without wearing pants.
Another job
is great because my coworkers are mostly 19 and 20 and have
a lot of energy and are fun to work with. One job lets me use my brain,
another lets me not use my brain. None require
exceptionally clean clothes or a haircut.
It seems like a
pretty okay set of gigs although probably ultimately destined to fail.
This weekend I am having an excellent houseguest [you may remember him as the sleeping, corpse-like, ill guest from December] and a huge party. If you are within travellin' distance, please come.
Remember when back in December I said I would tell you the answers to the what the heck is this Rorschach test when I was too busy to write anything else? Well, the time has come. I'm eating popcorn for dinner and wearing my last pair of clean socks, I've gotta fill some space. The first guess is the actual correct one. So, without further adieu:
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here's my guess fer the mysterious cartoon from yer journal.....it
was taken from a math book for kids ("there were five furry creatures
sitting on a ledge. take three away, and how many do you have?").
[todd]
It's a diagram of recent genetic experiments crossing elves with cotton balls. [chuck] As for the odd little don't-ask-me picture, my first, knee-jerk, no-bullshit reaction was that they were enormous lice (of the head or pubic variety, take your pick) and the hand was trying to sweep them from the infested hair follicle. [ratbastard] Periodic weeding of rejected saplings at the teletubby nursery. [mark] my opinion is that the picture is the first cuts for the part of young humpty dumpty pre ear-ectomy. Unfortunately, the three on stage right have not been selected to make it to the next level and are being gently escorted off the ledge, lest they should fall and Breakfast Equity have to pay their disability. [eileen]
five little onions five eggmen minus three eggmen equals two smiley eggmen because they don't get eaten by Mr. Mouth [matt] |
While I was away at work the other day, the DSL people secretly came and installed an odd looking grey box right onto the outside of my fake-brick-panelled 1/2-basement apartment. I assume they will show up later on and tell me what to do with it. I am starting to hate 28.8 dial-up in advance.
![[Fig 2. don't ask *me* what it is.....]](99pix/fig2.gif)
For a brief and somewhat exciting week, I may actually be in posession of
and working on seven jobs.
While
seven is the
symbol of heaven
[as
the woman in the licensing department told me when I got my business license
which had a large amount of sevens
in it] I'm not sure this does me any good
and am racing to get through with this week as quickly and painlessly as
possible. You know how there's names for those bad wake-up experiences where
you kinda forgot what you did, but you know it wasn't good? I'm trying to
find some good nomenclature for what I think I am going to feel tomorrow
when I walk into my kitchen trying to make coffee and will have to push
aside way too many empty Burger
King bags [onion rings at no extra cost!], beer bottles, and unopened
mail just to get my java fix.
The real problem with January is that I live about five minutes from the beach, but it's raining too hard for me to go hang out there...
The real problem with January is that even if it wasn't raining I would still manage to never leave my house. I have been putting ice cream in my coffee for three days now because I can't be bothered to go to the 7-11 which is less than one block from here.
Actually, I did manage to get out last night... I went golfing. Or rather, I went to the local driving range and hit a bucket of balls with Jack and Colin [you may know him as the Mad Monk]. This outing represents a pretty serious change in my attitude towards golf. Formerly, I have thought of golf as an obnoxious sport of the bourgeoisie. Now I think of it as a sport where you can go hobnob with and piss off the obnoxious bourgeoisie. After many failed attempts at using a five iron, Colin just decided he'd rather juggle the golf balls. I just kept cursing loudly. Jack, who lettered in golf in high school and only sold his clubs once we got married was trying to lend an air of respectability to our motley crew but didn't want to give us too much advice because of the big sign that warned against unauthorized teaching. We certainly weren't authorized. The place has 80 heated driving stations and was packed at 9:30 on a Friday night. And besides, I had a coupon.
I think I am going to wire my house for DSL this week. I got this deal as part of the vast underground economy that I seamlessly move through. It is costing me very little in cash, and a whole lot of [pseudo] sweat equity. To celebrate my foray into the world of 192K data transfers, I made a grilled peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I have this to say about it:
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I am on the run from illness. I don't know if the plague that my houseguest had is
finally catching up to me in some sort of divine retribution for my Florence
Nightingale behavior or if it's just The Crud That's Going Around and too much time
on public transportation and public libraries is bound to bring you down. Anyhow, I
had an ever-so-slight fever on Thursday. Friday I got up to go to work and decided
to hide from my illness by dressing up so that it couldn't recognize me. This
sometimes works in cases of bad moods. It certainly freaked people out at work
["that you in that dress?"] and I felt better. Today I feel flushed in that
romantic way we all think tuberculosis
patients must have felt when they weren't
busy coughing up a lung and lying among
white
sheets
in their rooftop hideaways.
Furnace guy came by today. I had the sudden realization that I am becoming a bad stereotype. I am that 30-something woman who answers the door in her pajamas at noon saying "come on in ... do you want a cup of coffee?" and wandering back into her darkened apartment. Of course, I look like that because I have recently been sleeping, not because I have been watching the Spice channel and lying in wait for the mailman. The fixit guys are all pretty nice about it and don't give me the old fisheye. I think maybe I'll bring up one of those Odd Fellows robes from the basement and wear that instead.
![[span, duh]](99pix/span.gif)
In true freezing January tradition, the furnace died
of unknown ailment today. Fortunately, the Odd Fellows had just completed a
vigorous basment cleaning [you should see some of the robes I wound up
with...] and knew the exact location of the space heater, which the cat
promptly lay underneath. Other hassles of 1999 include the hippies at my place in Vermont growing pot in my barn -- I
know,
what was I thinking? -- and I have spent more time that I would like arguing
about whether the Y2K disaster is of epic proportions or not. It's kind of
like flossing or eating kale, no one knows for sure and people fall
out on either the Safe or the Sorry side.
This graphic has nothing to do with any of that but came from a very cool encyclopedia called The Progressive Reference Library With Loose Leaf Revision Service, dated 1930. It was lying around in the back of Left Bank Books when I was cleaning up and they let me have it. A bitch to carry around on the bus, but well worth it.
I've been updating some of these pages since it's the end of the year and some of them are delineated by date. I've decided that except for the occasional changing of the heading and some stylistic updates, this page is going to stay looking more or less the same, even though it's sooo HTML 3.0. There's also a new calendar at the bottom for more random browsing. Takes a lot of code, but you guys are worth it...
New Year's Eve was a pleasant affair, with a potluck dinner for about 30, some vigorous dishwashing, a walk down the street, a trip to the bowling alley [high score: 175!], some more tripping, a walk in the park and a late night listening to the furnace. Yesterday was aggressive recovery, a lot of lying in bed with magazines and some nutritious Mexican food before an early bedtime. I have no resolutions as such.
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