Four Story Walkup
Jun. 22nd, 2006 09:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogSince I haven't posted in close to two days, you can imagine how chockablock full I am of things to talk about. Here, for your dining and dancing pleasure, are four of them- each cut to keep the entry from exploding your friendspage.
Right. Five days and numerous efforts in- just about the length of time our original kitties had each gone AWOL in their younger days- Biggsy just happened to show up outside the bathroom window yesterday a little before 4 a.m. I swear he was cleaner than when he left. There'd been numerous sightings in the neighborhood in the previous few days, so we figured it was just a matter of time.
You'd think, from his point of view, that he never left. He wakes up at the same time, plops himself in my office chair on the same after-breakfast schedule, sleeps and preens for most of the day, hisses at any dog who shows him any attention, and hangs out after dinner in a couple of usual spots. The only difference, if any? He's a bit more talkative. We told our closest neighbor, who commented, "Don't you wish they could talk long enough to tell you where they'd been and what they were thinking?"
Before I got home from a road trip yesterday, I laid in a new collar and tag for him at Petsmart. He's ripped it off no fewer than a half dozen times. I've threatened to sew it onto him if he keeps it up.
But we're happy as all getout to have our usual family back together again.
----
Which gets us to earlier today, when after a slight oversleep and a LOT of weird dreams (my sister having a parking garage collapse on her car, me offering her my old Ford Fuckus to tide her over, and missing the bus to get back home after driving it down to her), we spent the early afternoon at Em's middle school graduation.
I'd love to share a picture of the occasion, but alas they tripped us up on that. Instead of graduating them in alphabetical order, they did it by homeroom, but with the choir (which she's in) done first. While all the home bases went alphabetically per the program, the choir went in part/riser order, which meant she was there and gone before Eleanor could even get the camera out of her lap.
It was the usual graduation experience- a hot auditorium, too many too-long speeches, and a small bunch of type-A's-in-training winning all the awards. ("Allie Schweitzer was high honor roll all 12 quarters, first chair violin in orchestra, quarterback of the football team, fed 5,000 poor people at the City Mission with two Mrs. Paul's fish sticks and five loaves of Levy's Real Jewish Rye, yet still had spare time to knit an entire AIDS quilt, write five piano sonatas and research a cure for rickets.") Yet the smiles I saw on our daughter's face, and those of her similarly undistinguished friends, affirmed that she's probably got a brighter future ahead of her than all these resume-busters who're gonna be burned out by the time they're 19.
----
I came out of the auditorium to be greeted by a 12-bell carillion of voicemail messages, which began accumulating virtually the second I turned the cell off for the graduation ceremony. The highlight of them for me was word that my new all-in-one printing gezakis had come in to the office here.
When I got there a little after 3, the office manager started joking about how badly it had been packed and how it sounded like there were a million broken pieces inside. Only she wasn't joking. This eBay shipper used the original HP box, several bags of canned air to protect the power supply and USB wire, and little else to protect the contents. The box doesn't even say "fragile" on it, and when I got it in here, I discovered just how fragile. It includes a scanner, which involves, you guessed it, a glass surface. Or in this case a formerly glass surface. "Smithereens" doesn't begin to describe it.
Fortunately, I had the intact glass part from the dead one. Six screws and some delicate innie/outie-ing later, the glass had been replaced and glass-copying worked just fine- as did printing (I'd already checked). Still unsure about fax receipt, although that's not an issue; I'd downloaded a temporary solution to that, which loads the faxes directly into the computer with a Tom Bodett-sounding voice announcing the sending/receipt/error of your faxery ways.
Since then, though, I've discovered that the multipage feeder on the "new" unit jams, and the scanner won't talk to its own software on here, which was my whole point of bidding on the identical unit. So I wouldn't have to muck around in Control Panel and all that shit.
So the current top site on my list d'merde?http://www.atlasfrontiers.com" Live and learn, I suppose; I'll probably be at Some Puter Store this weekend getting the heavy duty jobber I should just gone out and brought home in the first place.
----
I can't spend a whole entry bitching, and what better way to end your bitchiness than by spending an hour with the Boys from Virginny?
The crowd was manageable and mostly theirs when I got down there right after finishing my workday. They started tuning and jamming a little past 5:30, and then Barry came out for the introductions. He seemed genuinely overwhelmed by the crowd that had turned out, which was only a fraction of what would be there by the time Blues Traveler started getting ready, but we're kinda cool that way.
I'd tried keeping track of the setlist on a running text message to myself, but it kept erasing itself every time I received a call (they naturally started the minute I sat down on the lawn) or made a concert call (waves to Lins). So here's my best recollection:
Changeless
What About Everything
Maybe Today (not sure on this one)
Texas Stars (damn cell kept dumping the text but the memory now thinks "texasstars" is a word)
Paloma
Let Your Troubles Roll By
The Boxer
Comfort (a song from the new CD out on September 12)
Life Less Ordinary
Um,....um.... anyone? anyone? Bueller?
And the finale, I'm sorry, don't taunt me but I still don't know the whole catalog, but it was this one. Trust me:
::puts over-under on someone getting the title of that at2 hours:: 20 minutes is more like it. Bron-y-aur, or so I'm told.
They then headed off, without much of an encore effort by the audience, which bummed me. Last summer's openers for GBS got 90 minutes of stage time including an encore. Barry encouraged us to head for the merchandise tent, and so I did in hope of a sighting. No such luck, although I do now own Five Alive for Five Bucks per disk.
On my way back to my former grassy knoll, I headed behind the stage and wound up seeing most of the band doing its own loadout. I find that immensely cool somehow. They also acquired quite a line of admirers passing up Blues Traveler with Carbon Leaf posters, guitars, and CDs much like my own new-booten gotty for the performer-roadies to sign. I'd come about two keyboards away from scoring The Setlist, as in the one on Terry's amp- if they'd tossed it in the trash can, it would have been minnnne all minnnne, preciouses.
Instead, I settled for his autograph on my new disk. I couldn't resist reminding him of an earlier exchange (no names mentioned, dear, don't worry) in which he, specifically, had come up:
Me: I needed to tell you that last winter, in comments on somebody's LiveJournal, you came in second in a Klingon lookalike contest.
Terry: Awww, man, that's not cool.
Me: Don't feel bad, though. Worf came in first, so you're still in excellent company.
I couldn't be sure if that settled him down or not.
And I'll post a copy of the autograph as soon as I get the !@##s scanner working.
Right. Five days and numerous efforts in- just about the length of time our original kitties had each gone AWOL in their younger days- Biggsy just happened to show up outside the bathroom window yesterday a little before 4 a.m. I swear he was cleaner than when he left. There'd been numerous sightings in the neighborhood in the previous few days, so we figured it was just a matter of time.
You'd think, from his point of view, that he never left. He wakes up at the same time, plops himself in my office chair on the same after-breakfast schedule, sleeps and preens for most of the day, hisses at any dog who shows him any attention, and hangs out after dinner in a couple of usual spots. The only difference, if any? He's a bit more talkative. We told our closest neighbor, who commented, "Don't you wish they could talk long enough to tell you where they'd been and what they were thinking?"
Before I got home from a road trip yesterday, I laid in a new collar and tag for him at Petsmart. He's ripped it off no fewer than a half dozen times. I've threatened to sew it onto him if he keeps it up.
But we're happy as all getout to have our usual family back together again.
----
Which gets us to earlier today, when after a slight oversleep and a LOT of weird dreams (my sister having a parking garage collapse on her car, me offering her my old Ford Fuckus to tide her over, and missing the bus to get back home after driving it down to her), we spent the early afternoon at Em's middle school graduation.
I'd love to share a picture of the occasion, but alas they tripped us up on that. Instead of graduating them in alphabetical order, they did it by homeroom, but with the choir (which she's in) done first. While all the home bases went alphabetically per the program, the choir went in part/riser order, which meant she was there and gone before Eleanor could even get the camera out of her lap.
It was the usual graduation experience- a hot auditorium, too many too-long speeches, and a small bunch of type-A's-in-training winning all the awards. ("Allie Schweitzer was high honor roll all 12 quarters, first chair violin in orchestra, quarterback of the football team, fed 5,000 poor people at the City Mission with two Mrs. Paul's fish sticks and five loaves of Levy's Real Jewish Rye, yet still had spare time to knit an entire AIDS quilt, write five piano sonatas and research a cure for rickets.") Yet the smiles I saw on our daughter's face, and those of her similarly undistinguished friends, affirmed that she's probably got a brighter future ahead of her than all these resume-busters who're gonna be burned out by the time they're 19.
----
I came out of the auditorium to be greeted by a 12-bell carillion of voicemail messages, which began accumulating virtually the second I turned the cell off for the graduation ceremony. The highlight of them for me was word that my new all-in-one printing gezakis had come in to the office here.
When I got there a little after 3, the office manager started joking about how badly it had been packed and how it sounded like there were a million broken pieces inside. Only she wasn't joking. This eBay shipper used the original HP box, several bags of canned air to protect the power supply and USB wire, and little else to protect the contents. The box doesn't even say "fragile" on it, and when I got it in here, I discovered just how fragile. It includes a scanner, which involves, you guessed it, a glass surface. Or in this case a formerly glass surface. "Smithereens" doesn't begin to describe it.
Fortunately, I had the intact glass part from the dead one. Six screws and some delicate innie/outie-ing later, the glass had been replaced and glass-copying worked just fine- as did printing (I'd already checked). Still unsure about fax receipt, although that's not an issue; I'd downloaded a temporary solution to that, which loads the faxes directly into the computer with a Tom Bodett-sounding voice announcing the sending/receipt/error of your faxery ways.
Since then, though, I've discovered that the multipage feeder on the "new" unit jams, and the scanner won't talk to its own software on here, which was my whole point of bidding on the identical unit. So I wouldn't have to muck around in Control Panel and all that shit.
So the current top site on my list d'merde?
----
I can't spend a whole entry bitching, and what better way to end your bitchiness than by spending an hour with the Boys from Virginny?
The crowd was manageable and mostly theirs when I got down there right after finishing my workday. They started tuning and jamming a little past 5:30, and then Barry came out for the introductions. He seemed genuinely overwhelmed by the crowd that had turned out, which was only a fraction of what would be there by the time Blues Traveler started getting ready, but we're kinda cool that way.
I'd tried keeping track of the setlist on a running text message to myself, but it kept erasing itself every time I received a call (they naturally started the minute I sat down on the lawn) or made a concert call (waves to Lins). So here's my best recollection:
Changeless
What About Everything
Maybe Today (not sure on this one)
Texas Stars (damn cell kept dumping the text but the memory now thinks "texasstars" is a word)
Paloma
Let Your Troubles Roll By
The Boxer
Comfort (a song from the new CD out on September 12)
Life Less Ordinary
Um,....um.... anyone? anyone? Bueller?
And the finale, I'm sorry, don't taunt me but I still don't know the whole catalog, but it was this one. Trust me:
::puts over-under on someone getting the title of that at
They then headed off, without much of an encore effort by the audience, which bummed me. Last summer's openers for GBS got 90 minutes of stage time including an encore. Barry encouraged us to head for the merchandise tent, and so I did in hope of a sighting. No such luck, although I do now own Five Alive for Five Bucks per disk.
On my way back to my former grassy knoll, I headed behind the stage and wound up seeing most of the band doing its own loadout. I find that immensely cool somehow. They also acquired quite a line of admirers passing up Blues Traveler with Carbon Leaf posters, guitars, and CDs much like my own new-booten gotty for the performer-roadies to sign. I'd come about two keyboards away from scoring The Setlist, as in the one on Terry's amp- if they'd tossed it in the trash can, it would have been minnnne all minnnne, preciouses.
Instead, I settled for his autograph on my new disk. I couldn't resist reminding him of an earlier exchange (no names mentioned, dear, don't worry) in which he, specifically, had come up:
Me: I needed to tell you that last winter, in comments on somebody's LiveJournal, you came in second in a Klingon lookalike contest.
Terry: Awww, man, that's not cool.
Me: Don't feel bad, though. Worf came in first, so you're still in excellent company.
I couldn't be sure if that settled him down or not.
And I'll post a copy of the autograph as soon as I get the !@##s scanner working.