The Pot Calling the Kettle Blech

Tonight I finished off the last of a particularly vast expanse of chicken pot pie.

I went to Costco on Saturday to buy soap, toilet paper, and laundry detergent. And on impluse I bought a chicken pot pie and the Wallace and Gromit trilogy on DVD. I'm still happy with 4 out of 5 of those purchases*, but the pie was a big mistake.

I like chicken pot pie, or so I thought. What I like is my Mom's chicken pot pie, where the crust is thin and the pie filling isn't a solid mass. Costco's pie was like eatable cement covered in a layer of quarter-inch thick plywood pie crush. (Piewood.**) My Mom's pie filling is like a blissfully pealess and really chunky chicken soup filled with, among other things, plenty of celery. (An ingredient disturbingly absent in Costco's monstrosity.) I like peas, but not in pie form.

Possibly worst of all, the piewood tasted terrible and was the bulk of the pie. I ate about a quarter of the pie, crust and all, on the first night. I ate the rest by digging the filling out, putting it in a bowl, adding a little water, and microwaving it. After all was said and eaten, the remaining 3/4 of a pie's worth of crust neatly filled a little more than half the pie tin. That's a lot of piewood.

I'm going to stick to frozen food from Trader Joes.

* It turns out I had plenty of toilet paper. Now the kitchen cupboard closest to the bathroom is now completely full of toilet paper. I can't fit one, single, extra roll in my apartment.

**
-What's your tree house made of?
+Piewood.
-Oh. It's leaving grease stains on my pants.
+Yeah, it does that. And it looks like it's about to rain, we should probably get down.

Pub Quiz Update

Thanks for the suggestions, but in the end we went with "Someone Stole My Leg Again." We came in third behind some ties for 2nd, and I have no idea if we won best name because it was 11:30 by the time the quiz ended. If you go to the Napper Tandy pub quiz, make sure Marissa is running it. Accept no substitutes.

Due to a perfect storm of an imprint soccer game and a beer and pizza special, the bar was stuffed full of quizzers, eaters, and loud Irish soccer fans. We had to move to the back room and huddle around the pool table to hear they guy read the questions. He was no Marissa, but he wasn't terrible. Apart from a few odd pronunciations (Lenny Kravitz pronounced Lenny crevice) his major problem was that he didn't speak loudly enough. So even after we moved to the room without the soccer fans, we still had to listen like we were trying to find a pinhole leak in a blimp. (You'd have to listen pretty hard to find that I would imagine.) And after each round everybody asked for every question to be repeated at least twice. 5 question rounds with 10 questions each is a lot repeats.

The biggest problem with pub quiz recently is the pub quiz helper. I'm not sure if she's an official member of the Napper Tandy staff. I hope she isn't because she's very nearly useless, and she's not even Irish*. She came around to our table and asked if we were going to play the quiz and we said that we were. We also asked for a pitcher of Fat Tire ale, and she said sure. 15 minutes later a real waitress came by asked, "Are yous guys ta ones who oredered ta Fat Toier? And ta pizza? Roight. We'll haf dat roight out fur ya." I picture Mrs. Useless going over to the real waitress and saying, "Somebody ordered something." Then pointing in our general direction.

The Pub Quiz Helper (PQH) is also not very friendly. When other people have taken on the task of being the PQH, they ask politely if you're done with a round, and if you aren't she'll either come back or ask you to bring it up to the table when you're done. Not the useless PQH. She walks around demanding the answer cards, and if, god forbid, you aren't finished writing because you were laughing at the pronunciation of fillim (film), she sighs heavily, rolls her eyes, and walks away, not returning until the next round.

Her other duty as PQH is to score the answer cards. This involves making sure the answers are right and then adding up the points. For instance we got 2, 10, and 8 points in rounds 1, 2, and 3 respectively. PQH added these up for a grand total of 18 points. We were seriously considering buying her one of those calculators with the insultingly large buttons.

I'm hoping next week will come baring a lot more Marissa and a lot less Useless PQH. And maybe we'll be "The licensed Purveyors of Poison." Although I'm sure it would take 2 or 3 rounds to finally pronounce the word purveyors correctly.

*Which is to say that if you are going to be working in an Irish bar and have no redeeming personality traits or skills, you should, at the very least, be Irish. It would at least give the tiniest of explanations of why the other employees let you stay. With that said it should now be apparent that I was not saying the Irish are useless.

Rock the Vote

I've been trying to gather pub quiz team names by reading Reuters Oddly Enough and stealing headlines and phrases from the articles. Here's my list so far. You can all vote and see whose gets picked. (If any of these do get picked.) And while you are at it, suggest some good ones for next time. It's surprisingly hard to come up with a fancy quality team name.

240,000 liters of pig manure
Turning dog waste into power
Killing over toilet paper
Would-be rock star plunges from bed to death
Death by misadventure
Well, that should wipe the pandemic right out
$4,000 for bird flu
Anterior crotch length
Competing under false pretences
En route to 96th place
Dart injuries rise sharply
Someone stole my leg again
Tiger poo is scary
Fun with horse(s) stencils (Not for Reuters, from Kristin.)
Chub quiz (Also from Kristin.)
Not Shane's dentist (There was a team that always won called Shane's dentist.)

Amazon Dot Rub It In

While trying to figure out if my sister's birthday present ever made it out of the void that is the Amazon.com warehouse, I clicked on my gold box offers. Gold box offers, for those of you who don't know, are things Amazon thinks you might like to have which have been bless with a special, minute gold box discount for 60 minutes. You have 10 things to choose from, each choice revealed after you've cast away the previous choice forever. As I was clicking through my offers, Amazon showed me no less than 4 books about having and/or getting a girlfriend. Apparently the online shopping community has taken it upon itself to pressure me into giving them grandkids.

In completely unrelated, but still irritating news, on my way home from work I was trying to turn left across a fairly busy street. Both my lane and the lane to my right are left turn friendly, and the car to my right was a very nicely restored yellow roadster. As we both took our lefts a guy started out crossing the street and stopped right in front of my van to watch the roadster go by in front of him. After he admiringly watched it drive off down the street he looked over at me as if we might share a common bond about seeing the great car drive by. We had no bond. When he noticed that I was not sharing in his celebration of automotive aesthetics and was instead looking mightily irritated that he had left me sticking out in traffic, he hustled the rest of the way across the street, only narrowly avoiding me honking at him.

Misc

- Up until yesterday at about 9:30pm, I wrongly assumed that the Taj Mahal was the Tajma Hall. Or at the very least, the Tajmahall. These are the things you learn while eating Indian pizza. (Which is quite good.) I had always thought of it as one of the several ornate halls of India.

- Over the past few weeks I've been working my way through all the William Gibson books. His first three are set at some point in the future and I like all his predictive details. For instance, people have little slots behind their ear into which they can insert little disks of information which he calls Microsofts. In the 80s, when the book was written, Microsoft was no where near the powerhouse it is today. He also uses the term The Matrix in roughly the same way the movie The Matrix uses it. Those kinds of things are cool. The next two books, which I originally read 5 or 6 years ago, are set 12 years in the future. Unfortunately they were written in 1993, which means they took place last year. I still like the stories, but now I have to get over the fact that he's just wrong about how the world turned out. Nobody lives on the Bay Bridge, California isn't divided up into two states (Northern and Southern, although it's not a bad idea), and nobody's building cities with nanotechnology yet. I've gotten past all this by pretending that both stories are set in the near future. It makes reading them a lot less distracting.

- Today was a medium grade holiday, which means that I was at work and doctors were not. That, in turn, means that we had nothing to do all day. (Our mattresses are prescription, so doctors have to be around to prescribe them.) Boredom coupled with the after effects of sleeping on a couch, and then an air mattress near a snorer over the weekend is making me crave climbing into bed.

- Flakey McOnion emailed me to say she was up for dinner tonight at 10:10pm yesterday. But since I got home late, went right to bed, didn't have time to check my email this morning, and don't have email access at work, I didn't get the message until 6:30pm today. If we're still using the whack-a-mole analogy, then it's like the mole has popped up after I've gone to ask the manager to refund my quarter.

- And finally, my dentist seems to be trying to sneak the full cost of my cleaning into my bill. They sent me a letter asking me to send them a check for $125 for "Balance Forward." After calling for a more detailed bill (i.e. a bill with ANY details), going over it for a half hour with a calculator and my insurance statements, and googling the term prophylaxis, I discovered what they were up to. Why not charge my insurance for a cleaning? After I get this straightened out I'm never going there again. If anybody out there is trying to choose a dentist in San Francisco, send me an email and I'll give you one to avoid.

neither Funny nor Interesting

I was emailing this girl from The Onion Personals, and I thought things were going well until she disappeared. So then I thought I had somehow offended her. It's not like girls haven't disappeared on me before. But then out of the blue she reappears, asks if I want to meet up, and disappears again. So I think I'm going to either say no thank you or ignore her if she resurfaces again. She's like the online dating verion of whack-a-mole.

I'm currently irritated at the flakey people of the world.

(I'm on the fence about whether to even post this in all its bland mediocrity. But I've been so good about posting since Sunday, I hate to ruin my streak. Then again, since I'm getting comment numbers in the single round digits lately, maybe nobody's reading and I can be just as boring as I'd like. So there. ZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.)

Alas, The Pub Quiz Update

We came in at a miserable 6th place.

Our first round got us off to a great start, but round two was our first death nail with only 3 points earned. Then we made a rousing come back until the last round where we again only got 3 questions right.

Still, we hoped to beat the irritating girl who kept challenging people to arm wrestle last week or maybe to get best name. Alas we did neither. Irritating-ette came in a couple places ahead of us, and although Hunting with Dick was an excellent name, there was no best name category for some reason.

We could have also won most gay sounding name. Especially because we got all the questions about musicals and Barbara Streisand.

Click

I've been having very poor luck with Onion Personals. Actually, I've been having poor luck with girls in general.

This weekend I went to a party and talked for a good long while with a girl. I thought it went rather well overall. Although there were moments where I wondered where I was going with pieces of the conversation. I don't seem to be able to avoid such moments.

As a for instance, she mentioned that she had recently started running. I made some comment about how running is AWFUL, then worried that I had offended her and explained that running isn't intrinsically awful, I just hate running when I do it. I went on to say that I have the utmost respect for runners. She looked a me quizzically for a second and said, "it's not like U.N. peace keeping or something. We aren't taking our lives in our hands when we run." And I countered that runners kind of are, especially if they feel like I do when I run.

She assumed that maybe I hadn't run regularly, but I pointed out that I had been on the track team for my first 3 years of high school. I even told her about the coach making my friend and I run with the girl's team because we couldn't keep up with the guy's team, and that he had a heart murmur and that I just sucked.

Anyhow, I managed to recover from that and we talked for a while longer, and then we went our seperate ways. I should have asked for her phone number, but I'm dumb and I didn't. I did, however, find her email address via Google by searching for her school program. I didn't have to work that hard at it, so I felt like it wasn't toooooo creepy to email her. So I did, but needless to say I haven't heard back.

Back in the personals department I've had a pretty poor email response as well. So I'm thinking I need to post a close up picture. All the featured people have close ups, and I think it's the ticket to fame and popularity on the internet. With that in mind I took maybe 25 pictures of myself, which I've narrowed down to 3, which I've further narrowed down to 0. It is apparently very difficult to catch my face in a pose where it resembles a well mannered human being's. In various pictures I look stoned, asleep, retarded, seethingly angry, marginally irritated as somebody just out of frame to my left, psychopathic, and caught in a soul crushing bout of despair. Oh, and lets not forget the ever popular out of focus.

Hopefully by next year this will all be behind me and I'll be out and about with somebody who enjoys the disturbingly varied faces of me.

Concert

Ah, the Fillmore. The performers may change, but the audience remains the same.

On Thursday I went to see a solo Jeff Tweedy. I'm actually not a big fan of Wilco, his band, but I had heard the Tweedster on some radio interviews where he played sans Wilco. I liked him on the radio and I really liked him live. That's not really the point of this post though.

The point of this post is people smoking stuff inside and how it's marginally irritating depending on what it is. It seems to be pretty standard fare for people to produce a pipe or joint and pass it around their group of friends at a show. And while I think it smells really bad, it doesn't really offend me, although my shirt kind of smelled after Thursday's show and that made me a little cranky.

It may not have been the pot people's fault though. Part way through the show the people directly behind me starting smoking something that smelled an awful lot like burning leaves with a magnifying glass. But to me that's not a bad smell. It reminds me of torturing ants as a kid in Portland.

Unfortunately they ran out of leaves and/or sunlight and they switched to smoking a Louis Rich turkey dog in a plastic bubble pipe. I didn't turn around for fear that I would actually see the end of a turkey dog bobbing around as it waited to be engulfed by the flaming end of a plastic bubble pipe, and that would have made me want to leave. I swear up and down that's exactly what it smelled like though. And I'm qualified to know. I have an excellent sense of smell, I like turkey dogs but can't cook, and I have set a number of pieces of plastic on fire.

Finally, on the theme of good ideas, here's an excellent name for a business and an excellent idea for a business:

Cocinar Con Miguel*

On Friday night I whipped up quite the feast. I had salad (in a bag), an artichoke with butter (margarine), and pan fried, seasoned, wild turbot (pre-seasoned and frozen in a bag from Trader Joes). I made it all myself AND it tasted good.

I measured out my oil and put it in the pan to pre-heat. As the oil started to smoke I put the fish on and turned on the oven hood fan. The smoke continued to spread through the kitchen as my fan began to make a horrible inward sucking fart sound. I had neglected to remove the saran wrap I use to keep the offensive cooking smells from upstairs from invading my space through the vent. In order to remove the plastic wrap I had to unscrew the vent cover, so I reached into my junk drawer to get my Swiss army knife. As I rushed to unscrew the vent I got a little more motivation from my smoke alarm whose sole purpose in life is to warn my neighbors that I'm cooking something. Within about a minute I had the vent uncovered and sucking, my microwave timing the fish, and my smoke alarm on silent mode and tucked safely under my comforter in my bedroom.

With the turbot well on its way to becoming food, I started on my artichoke. Easy enough, just put it in a little bowl with some water, cover, and microwave for 5 minutes. The artichoke cooking went smoothly apart from a slight steam burn when I removed the cover.

With the artichoke and fish both done I scooped some margarine into a little cup for dipping and put in the microwave for 40 seconds. The margarine itself came out fine, but its lid suffered some injuries. Here's a cooking tip: Don't set a plastic lid on a burner cover. Burner covers sit over open flame and are hot. Hot things melt plastic. There, I've now imparted all my cooking knowledge.

Looking back over my evening a theme emerges - covers, both good and bad. The bad: My vent cover, the artichoke cover, and the margarine lid. The good: The covers of my bed who valiantly make sure that my smoke alarm doesn't go off twice during the same cooking session**.



*I'm sure the title of this post translates to me being used as an ingredient or something.

**It stays under my covers until I go to bed, stretch out my legs, and find it lurking there all cold and plastic. Then it spends the night on bedside table and goes back up in its holder first thing in the morning. Such is the life of a smoke detector in my house.

Shoe String Budget

I have some old Adidas Sambas that I wear to work. The leather is getting cracked and worn and the soles have no traction, but I still like to wear them. I'd get a new pair except you can't find them anyplace. (eBay has a pair once in a while but they are waaay too much.)

I was thinking of retiring them because one of the stripes on the right shoe was starting to let go and stuck out like a little wing from the side of my foot. This fact often goes noticed* and many a stranger has pointed out that maybe it's time for new shoes. It's just that I don't want to spend money on shoes which are going to go slogging through pee-smelling trailer park carpets.

So, being my mother's son, I've sewn the stripe back on to my shoe. It was really hard to push the needle through 2 layers of shoe leather, but I persevered and a half hour and some perforated fingers later my shoes are as good as new. Or at least as good as they were before one decided to grow a wing.

Now if you'll excuse me I'm off to the Tenderloin to pick up a bed frame. Yet another example of a neighborhood where one doesn't want to wear new shoes.

* As opposed to going unnoticed. I was thinking of saying does not go unnoticed but I am trying to stay more positive lately.

Dos Thingos

Today I delivered a bed frame and mattress to a little old nun with a penchant for watching sports. She mentioned her love of sports 4 times in relation to her new LCD TV, the fast approaching winter Olympics, plasma TVs and how they are bigger and therefore the action is easier to see with her failing eyesight, and finally how she's not good with electronics, but is okay with the TV as long as she can find the sports. Her other little quark was that she was getting a bed as kind of an experiment. Apparently she's been sleeping in a recliner for 15 years.

Speaking of sleeping, Wednesday night I dreamed that I was having a picnic with some of my friends on the grass surrounded by a u-shaped KQED building. KQED is our local NPR affiliate and I was at this picnic because KQED was having an event to showcase their newest pledge drive membership gifts.

This year they had gone well past the tote bag and had introduced the apocalypse bear. The apocalypse bear was actually a little, furry, black, robot dog which came over to repeatedly bite my feet. (Kind of like Norbert.) I thought it was kind of an overly melodramatic name for a robot that was most just annoying. But Norm Howard explained that if all goes well each apocalypse bear will die, become diseased, and will cause one of the 7 plagues.

Anybody want to analyze that?

Pub Quiz Update

1st place tonight. We actually tied and it came down to our representative (whose name escapes me, we have roughly a million people on our team tonight) and an oddly aggressive girl who kept offering to settle things with an arm wrestling match.

The final question: In which year was the presidential election first predicted using a computer. Our representative's guess: 1956 (after scratching out 1952.) Her guess: 1980. The correct answer: 1952.

So the $30 voucher for the Napper Tandy was ours, One Chicken in Arkansas.

On a related note, did you know that Apocalypse Later is the name of a band that apparently nobody likes?

Horray for Wednesday

And not just because it's pub quiz night, but because it means Tuesday is over. Today did not go well.

My first stop was a delivery of a bed frame to waaaay out in the middle of nowhere. When I got out there I discovered that the address I had been given was wrong. I called up the patient's daughter and she spelled the street for me and also gave me their apartment number. Helpful information to have. Unfortunately I still couldn't find it so I called her again and she grudgingly gave me directions. The reason I couldn't find it was that customer service gave me the wrong street, no apartment number, and had me in the city 9 miles too far down the road.

Once I got to the place I had to lug 250 pounds of bed (in more than 1 trip, I'm not that strong) into an apartment that smelled as though somebody had been continuously letting go of a fart since the beginning of the universe. And not only was the apartment maliciously odorous but it was also full of junk. It's very difficult to lug heavy pieces of bed-shaped steel over junk. And it kills your sense accomplishment when you discover that the room in which the bed is supposed to be placed is already full of an old and particularly nasty hospital bed. The daughter and I fixed that problem by lugging the disgusting thing out into the living room.

During all of this lugging there was a large, strapping, and seemingly capable guy who observed the goings on from the most irritating spot he could find. If I was trying to move the new bed into the room, he'd stand in the doorway so I'd have to squeeze by. If I was trying to weave between the patient in his wheelchair, the blasting TV, and the old hospital bed, he would set himself up as yet another obstacle to crossing the living room. Mr. Helpful I think his name was.

The best part, my favorite part, was when I was trying to put the two halves of the new bed together and I had to move stuff to make room. I'm okay with moving stuff. It doesn't bother me ... usually. But today I had to move a half gallon glass jar full of hypodermic needles. A house just isn't home without one.

To top off this particular delivery, the moment I was ready to get the 20 pages of paperwork signed was the same moment that this lady's kids needed to be picked up. Mr. Helpful, sensing that he could be more irritating elsewhere, disappeared leaving me to wait around until the lady could go get her kids and come back.

I hate customers.

That's not true. My last delivery of the day was to a guy who had to type everything to me. He'd tap away at his keyboard and then press the talk button and a little computer voice would let me know what he had typed. Since TTS engines aren't perfect he had to spell some things phonetically to get them to sound right. He got a big smile on his face when he typed that I should contact his nurse at hoss piss. I liked him.

I did not, however enjoy trying to find him. Customer service paged me with all his information: Name, mattress type, address, and phone number. They got the type of mattress right. That was it. The only reason I had any luck finding him at all was that I happen to have the number to hospice memorized.

So I say again: Hooray for Wednesday.

Elder Something or Other

The Mormons came to visit tonight. I have often seen pairs of them wandering around the city with their white shirts, black slacks and backpacks; but I've never actually had any come to my door.

This is not to say I've been blessed with a total lack of people trying to convert me. Whenever I was in the Memorial Union at school (usually trying to do homework* and drinking a bathtub sized Coke) the Christians would come and harass me. And I have to say, I like the Mormons much better. The Christians pairs always kind of creeped me out. There'd be one normal guy who would approach me, introduce himself, and then introduce his creepy friend who always lurked 3 or 4 feet back from my table. It was like they were playing good cop/weird cop. I would tell them I needed to get stuff done and they would ask if they could leave some literature. Usually I'd say sure, and they'd leave, and I'd recycle it.

On one occasion the same normal-creepy combo found me 2 days in a row and came over to quiz me on the literature they'd left.

"Did you read it?"
"Yep."
"Well then, what did it say?"
"Something along the lines of accept Jesus and I'll go to heaven."
"Um. Well. That's not quite all of it."
"Yeah, sorry, I really need to have this circuits homework done by 1."

I just think it's a little weird that the extremely religious try so hard to recruit people. Especially when they know it is going to annoy the vast majority of people. And it's not like the evils of the world try that hard. I've never had anyone approach me and ask if I've welcomed the calming influence of heroin into my life.

Anyhow, back to the Mormons. They looked a little surprised when I answered the door. I guess they weren't expecting a white guy. When I said I wasn't interested, they gave me a little postcard and asked if I knew where the Chinese people live. I said I didn't know specifically, but they had a good chance of finding some by sticking to my street. They thanked me and left.

The postcard they offered posed some questions designed to make me think about spirituality and where my life is going. What is the Nature of God? What is the Purpose of Life? (Their capitals, not mine.) And it directed me to Mormon.org, where there is a picture of a guy sitting on a mountain contemplating the big questions of life in acid-washed jeans.

I went to their site and I even watched their Mormon.org video, which took some doing as the site isn't compatible with Firefox**. The video didn't enlighten me much, but it did re-feature the acid washed jeans guy.

Come to think of it, he may just be trying to figure out how to get off the mountain.

* And by do homework I mean look at girls.

** Nerd Alert: Their site is plenty compatible with Firefox, they just coded it so it would see that I wasn't using Netscape or IE and tell me I couldn't watch their video. And yet once I dug through 2 pages of code and found the link to the video I watched it just fine. That's probably the best way to get me to watch a video about your religion: Tell me my software is incompatible so I can't watch it.

Tuesday Night

I opened my eyes and looked at the clock: 11:00 on the dot. Was it time to get up already? Do I usually get up now? What does my alarm say?

Flicking the switch on my clock made the display read 6:00. Is that what time it is now? Am I late for work? Why was it on the alarm setting when I looked the first time? What's with all the even times?

Stumbling out of bed, I stabbed at my computer's on button before making a move toward the bathroom. A step outside my bedroom door I paused while a groggy epiphany gurgled to the surface of my barely formed consciousness: It's 11pm, I've been asleep for 45 minutes, and I don't know why I woke up but it certainly wasn't because my alarm went off. Go back to bed.

I turned around, clicked my computer screen off, and happily went back to bed. I had a feeling I hadn't had enough sleep when I woke up. And I was right.

And this, my friends, is why I don't take naps.

The First Pub Quiz Update in a Very Long Time

Tonight we came in 4th place with the team name "Superman Wears Chuck Norris Pajamas."

I didn't catch the 1st place team's name, but the winner of funniest name was "Gimme You Tots." We were robbed, which was possibly due to the fact that the person reading the names kept saying Norris's instead of Norris. Superman wearing Chuck Norris's pajamas is a whole other thing. How did he get Chuck Norris's pajamas? Was there a mix up in the dark where Superman ended up with a robe and black belt and Chuck turns on the light to discover he's wearing red underpants on top of his blue tights?

Fish in the Sea and in the Freezer

Tonight I came home with a plan of action: Cook dinner, get my huge expense report ready to turn in, and email the girl who winked at me on the Onion Personals.

My expense report is complete and ready to put in an envelope.

My dinner has been cooked and eaten.*

The girl's wink has gone unrequited. I didn't mean to not write her, it's just that somebody else wrote me a real email on the site and I felt I should answer it first. So I did, and now I'm going to go to bed, winker ignored. I'm going to bed without emailing partially because I'm tired and worried I'm getting sick, and partially because it stressed me out to have two email strings going at once.

All you ladies out there, you can rest assured I would never cheat on you. It stresses me out to date two girls at once even when it's allowed.


*I made the pre-packaged, frozen, pre-spiced cod steaks from Trader Joes. Those and some peas constituted dinner tonight, and I was excited by the ease and healthful nature of the meal. Unfortunately the cod steaks came out with the consistency of an elegantyly sliced gummy worm and the spices where a bit much. I'm hoping the salmon steaks will be a little less bouncy, and taste a little less bad.

The Problem With Tempe

My issue with Tempe, other than the plywood and springs method of bedding at the Comfort Inn, is the humidity, or really the lack there of.

Tomorrow at 2pm, the humidity in Tempe will be paltry 14%. Tonight, the humidity in my living room was 70%*. One of these places keeps my lips feeling soft and supple, and the other leaves them cracked, flakey, and arranged in kind of an angry bite-kiss shape.

They are on the road to recovery now, but my lips were in bad shape in Arizona. And I know I could put on chap stick, but I haaaate chap stick. It feels so disturbingly icky. I don't want any part of my face to be to sticky or gooey. Putting on chap stick for me is akin to being hit in the face with a stick of bacon and not reaching for the nearest handy-wipe. Or perhaps like going to bed with a slab of butter nestled between my lips. It might be a culinarily lovely way to spend an evening, but it's going to make my face feel gross until I wipe it off.

And so my lips remain, uncomfortably recently exfoliated, but recovering unaided.

*I turned on my dehumidifier and now it's 50%. I don't much care for dry skin, but I also don't like indoor rain storms.

Dream Analysis

I went to the dentist and it was determined that I needed a bridge. A bridge in this case meant that I needed to have each of my teeth removed and fitted with two small metal ends where the roots should be. On my gums a receptacle would be installed where each of my teeth would plug in. (Picture, if you can, the interface between an overhead projector light bulb and its socket.)

The best person to do the bridge procedure was a dentist in a little wooden house on a hill. I went up to his house with a basket of offerings, mostly candy and bread. I realized that the offerings were for him to eat while performing the operation when he answered the door and accepted me as a patient saying, "I hope you're prepared. It's an 8 hour procedure at the very least. After I've started there's no stopping, so I'll be done when I'm done."

When I woke up I had to think for a while about who the dentist was. He looked so familiar. I knew he looked an awful lot like Larry Hagman from I Dream of Jeanie, but it definitely wasn't him. After a minute it came to me: Chief Justice John Roberts.

Travel Heater

I'm having some trouble with the temperature of my hotel room. At night I'd like it to be cold, and in the morning I would like it to be warm. Two nights ago I compromised by just turning the fan on, and that worked pretty well. But last night I was just a little too hot, so I turned on the AC. This morning I woke up just seconds away from full blown hypothermia.

When I got up I turned off the AC and headed to the bathroom, but since I have no bathrobe and hotel towels are all the size of cocktail napkins, I had nothing with which to keep me from freezing to death while on the toilet.

At my apartment I solve this problem with a space heater. Unfortunately it didn't occur to me to pack my space heater, so I did the next best thing: I took the wall mounted blow dryer off it's stand, and then took the stand off the wall, unfurling the plug to its full length. This gave me just enough cord to get the blow dryer into the bathroom so I could sit on the toilet in relative comfort, selectively warming all of my bits.

Tomorrow I think I'll just turn on the heat first thing.

Briefly

Because the Cheesecake Factory used up my evening (it was worth it) I've decided to go to bed instead of talk about the extraordinary number of women with breast implants who are out and about in Phoenix.

I did, however, manage to write some haikus.

Here

Ah Tempe, last bastion of the thick soled flip-flop. A city where all the women are blond, and the airport cops ride around on Segways.

Tempe reminds me of Albuquerque, with less adobe and no turquoise stripes. I don't think I'd like living here what with all the flat and the hot, but it's nice to have 70 degree weather in January.

It is not, however, nice to have jumpy elephants in the hotel room above mine. If they persist in the night time gallivanting I'm going to have to see about getting a different room. Perhaps one with a view of a different portion of parking lot.

Stupid Phone People

I'm currently on the phone with the slowest, most uninformed phone survey guy ever. He keeps asking stuff like, "Which of the following best describes your internet access?" ... ... "hello?"

"Are there options?"

"Yes."

"What are they?"

He did that to me 4 times during the call. If the question starts out with "which of the following" then you have to read me the things that follow.

Then after we had established the fact that I make long distance calls from my cell phone, and that I live alone he asked how many people in my household make long distance calls. Hmmmm. Let me go around the room and count. One. Yep, just me.

"So one then?"

"Um, ... yeah."

"Which of the following best describes your household income? ... ... ... hello?"

"What are the options?"

"Below fifteen thousand? Fifteen thousand to twenty-five hundred? Twenty-five hundred to thirty-five hundred? ..."

Hmm. The incomes ranges went up for a second and then came back down again. I guess when he says hundred he means thousand.

When asked why I canceled my SBC long distance service I explained that they said it would be free if I didn't use it, then a month later started charging me a monthly fee. I'm a reasonable fast typist, so it took me less than 10 seconds to type that sentence. It took the survey guy literally 5 minutes to get that all down. I guess the survey company hiring standards are a tad low.

In other phone news, the Asian business community here answers the phone, "hello?" It's very confusing. When calling around the city looking for 12 volt 8 amp-hour rechargeable sealed lead acid batteries, one doesn't expect the shop owner to answer the phone, "hello?" I kept having to look back down at the phonebook to ask if I had indeed reached Acme Battery Company. Say the name of your company people. It will save us all a lot of time.

Gone, Again

Norbert is gone, again. She went off to Oakland, and then came back the next day after it was realized that med school and a cat don't mix well. But the very same day I learned she was returning, somebody at a facility I go to all the time said she wanted a cat. So it worked itself out. I think.

My sense of relief is not all I hoped it might be now that I've dropped her off. The saucer of milk worried me a little, and then having to answer the question, "How do you clean her?" made me a little apprehensive. But what can you do? It's not like I could say, "Never mind. I think I'll keep her."

I think I'm going to make a fake SPCA pamphlet and give it to her tomorrow. Hopefully writing some basic cat facts down will unmix my very mixed feelings about being rid of Norbert again.

Nerding It Up At Work

Today I went to Electronics Plus and got two diode chips that I'm going to put back to front inside one of our pumps in hopes of recreating a broken rectifier chip that they don't carry.

Whew! Now that that's out of my system I can tell you about how I'm being shipped off to Tempe, AZ to help shuffle mattresses out there for a week. I've never traveled for business before, and I'm not sure if I'm going to like it.

There are pros:
-Free hotel stay.
-Free meals.
-It should theoretically be less cold than it is here.
-I get paid for flying.
-Flying takes up part of my work day on both Monday and Friday, so I'm really only working 4 full days next week, but being paid for 5.

But there are also cons:
-I may have to socialize with people I don't know.
-I don't get to go home and then end of the day.

Ok, so there are only two cons, but the first one worries me the most. New people are scary.

Never the less, I think it will be well worth it for the following reason: There is a Cheesecake Factory 18 miles from my hotel. So there will be at least one meal of Chicken Madera.

Does anyone know any good places to eat in Tempe? (EhhemCatemmm?)

Some Quick Things

- Norbert has gone back to Oakland, this time for good. I'll miss her sitting on my chest while I watch TV, but it'll be nice not having to sweep every 4 minutes. With Norbert out of the pictures my new couches have been uncovered, there's no water bowl in my sink, and there's a litter scooper on my kitchen counter. My apartment is on its way to cleanliness, apart from the scoop on my counter. I forgot to pack it with the rest of the cat stuff. (I think on the kitchen counter is definitely in the top 10 places I would least like to find a used litter scoop. Some of the top 5 being in my dinner, in my bed, and jumping out at me in the shower.)

- I just washed my Brita water pitcher tonight. It may have been the first time it has been washed. Yeah, the first time ever. I think its going on 4 years old. I also changed the filter. We'll see if my water tastes oddly fresh tomorrow.

- Now that I've got my couches uncovered I think they may clash with my walls. I'll post a picture tomorrow and let you be the judge. And then when you all weigh in nothing will change because I'm not getting new couches nor am I painting the walls. And you know my thoughts on slip covers.

This morning I swished with Listerine and cat hair. I didn't find it any more effective than Listerine by itself. It doesn't remove the need to floss like you'd think it would.

Nose Woes (Non-Verse Version)

Last night I settled into bed, rested my head upon my pillow, and relaxed to an online episode of Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me. Perhaps sensing my calm, Norbert climbed up on my chest, turned a little circle, flopped over, and started to purr. As I stroked her neck and shoulders she closed her eyes and nestled her head down onto my chest. With each stroke she relaxed a little more until a little cat fart snuck out. She may not have even noticed, but I nearly died. It was the worst smell I had ever had the misfortune to meet - until today.

Today I walked into the bathroom at a rehab facility in Fairfield. Now you're probably thinking that I'm going to describe some disgusting, unwashed, hole of a toilet or something. But that isn't the case; in fact it was just the opposite. When the lady walked out of it and handed me the key I thought to myself, "Oh, she smells a little like a rose." It wasn't her, however, that smelled like the rose, it was the bathroom. And there was a reason I could still smell her rosieness 6 feet after she's left the bathroom: it was the most pungent, omnipotent rose smell ever.

The air was roughly 5% oxygen and 95% rose smell molecules. On the walls there were no less than 3 bowls of potpourri and a tiny castle with plastic, scent-exuding nozzles. My nose and throat burned and my eyes started to water. I coughed* long and hard while I was in the bathroom and continued coughing intermittently during my half-hour drive home.

If you want a clear mental image of what it was like to enter the bathroom, picture the following scenario: You are a death row inmate talking your last walk into the gas chamber. You're not looking forward to it, but you've made your peace and are resigned to your inevitable end. As you walk through the door into the room you notice a small sign on the wall:

This gas chamber is maintained and operated by a joint partnership of Hallmark and the perfume counter at Macy's. Whether it be Heaven or Hell, you'll love the way you smell.





*It is VERY hard to pee and aim and cough all at the same time.

Divide and Customize

Now, with this weekend's purchase of a loveseat and chair and tonight's purchase of a great big rug, my apartment is starting to look like an apartment**. I've been trying to move away from the dorm room motif ever since I moved in, but the going has been slow.

The first step was to get a real bed. I realized when I was watching The Office and a character on the show made a comment about grown men sleeping on futons that perhaps I should upgrade.

Step two was to put up pictures, paintings, and things in frames instead of posters of Wallace and Gromit, Radiohead, R.E.M., and Out-of-Focus-Batman*. Now I have framed photographs of "Suicide Clifford", "Sink on Fire", and "Mystery Mexican Family" among others. (And I was holding out on taking down my enormous R.E.M. poster until Norbert starting tearing it off the wall.)

The final step was to remove my futon completely from my apartment and get some real seating. And while I was at it, a carpet so it didn't feel like you were sitting on a couch in the kitchen.

So now I've accomplished all those things and won't be embarrassed to take a date back to my apartment. Which I will some day do, assuming I can avoid discussing bedsores, describing myself as completely friendless, and driving for hours in circles. Maybe I should focus on that stuff now.



*OoF Batman was a poster I bought at my local video store in high school. He's a glow in the dark Batman, but the glow stuff is slightly off center so when the lights are on he just looks like he's out of focus.

**I know, not a great sentence. What I am trying to say is that it looks like somebody who is 3 years off 30 lives there instead of 3 years of 20.

Poop Poop, Fuzz Fuzz, Oh What A Nice Cat She Was

Norbert is leaving this weekend. (I think she is anyhow.) Luckily she's thought ahead and left me all the stuff I need to make a new Norbert, namely bits of poo and tufts of cat hair the size of Roseanne. I figure I can scrape the poo bits off my floor and press them together in the shape of a cat, and then upholster my creation with all the residual cat hair from behind my stereo equipment and from off my blankets and chairs.

This poo-kicked-out-of-the-litter-box-and-squished-to-the-floor stuff is a new and highly unwelcome development. I've been made fun of for never, ever walking around barefoot. And I realize it's cheating to say a retro active I told you so, but every time my slipper sticks another turd to the tile I feel vindicated.

Cat Makes Discovery: Levitating is Harder than Previously Assumed

Today I got some new furniture for my apartment. Specifically a chair and loveseat to replace my god-awful futon. And because I think it's kind of nice to be able to walk through my apartment unhindered, I decided to get rid of my coffee table.

It was a run of the mill wood framed table with glass top on which Norbert had enjoyed countless hours, nose a half inch from my dinner, or trying to put a paw in my cereal. So I cleaned the top and wiped the food chunks off the frame and put an ad on Craigslist. To keep Norbert prints off the glass, I leaned it on the wall behind my bedroom door.

When I sat down to wait for the guy to come get the table I discovered a great new game for Norbert and I to play. It's called watch the cat try to jump onto the glass top table when there's no glass. I'm not sure how well she likes it, but I think it's hilarious. She leaps off the couch with all the confidence a cat can muster, and only when she starts to pass through the middle of the table does she start to look surprised. 2 more jumps later and she's got it figured out. First get onto the frame, and then step onto the glass. Nope. Fell through the middle again.

Alas, about 30 seconds after she very carefully fell through the table the guy came to collect it. But it was fun while it lasted.

I don't understand slipcovers.

I'm looking for a couch and chair for my apartment. At the moment I have a futon in my livitchen which makes a fairly nice bed and an awful couch. Unless I sit bolt upright with my legs up on my coffee table, it's extremely uncomfortable. I'm 5'10"-ish, and if I sit all the way back in the futon my feet barely touch the ground. If I stretch out on the futon and don't have some pillows adjusted just so I get terrible neck and shoulder pain. And it's ugly.

So I'm searching through criagslist to find myself some better seating arrangements and I'm finding billions of sofas hidden under slipcovers. If it's a nice sofa, then I'm sure the slip cover is meant to keep it nice. But nobody can tell it's a nice sofa because slipcovers are so ugly. Like putting a Ford Festiva suit on your Mini Cooper. And if it's an ugly sofa, then it's going to be an ugly sofa under an ugly slipcover. Rather like dressing a turd up in a vomit suit.

With that said, if I go buy the chair/couch combination tomorrow, I'm going to have to cover it up to keep Norbert from ruining it during her last week here. So hypocrisy will be only temporary, and therefore discountable.

Referrals

Somebody found my blog by searching MSN for swollen limp noids. That makes me happy. Two people found my blog by asking Yahoo for woman pooping stories and females pooping school toilets. That does not.

Apparently there are other people out there who have nothing with which to fill their weekend evenings.

Say Aw

Has anyone ever tried flossing when your TMJ is acting up? It's almost enough to make me not want to floss.

Actually flossing is enough to not make me want to floss, but I've been doing a good job anyway. Tonight, however, I'm tired and I know that my jaw will be sore if I wrench my mouth open enough to get my fingers in there. In addition, I managed to cut one of my flossing fingers at work, so the floss gets in the cut and tries to pull it apart.

The cards are truly stacked against my mouth this week. I hope brushing and Listerine are going to be enough. I also hope that I get back into the flossing when I can open my mouth again, pain free.

As the late, great Mitch Hedberg once said, "it's as hard to quit smoking as it is to start flossing."

Since it's 11:31 and I need to wake up at 6am, I'll just write the following two things:

1) I have some new boxer shorts. I've been wearing a pair all day and I haven't had a single wedgy. Hooray for Hathaway Sport.

2) The reason it's 11:31 and I'm still up is that I just got back from watching King Kong: The story of the love between a girl and a great big monkey. It was pretty good, but that's not what #2 is about. My observation for this section of the post is that there were several scenes where Adrian Brody it looking off to the camera's left and where his nose is looking right into the camera. It's as if he was drawn by somebody with a bad sense of perspective.

Bed time.

The Great Floods of Aught 5

Because somebody has to be available to shuttle mattresses around the greater bay area 365 days a year, and because I wasn't on call for Halloween, Thanksgiving, or Christmas, I had to be on call for New Years weekend. I wasn't too worried about it. Over Christmas there were hardly any calls and the tech only had to go out twice. My luck wasn't nearly so good.

By Friday night I had 3 Sacramentos and 2 Napas. Saturday morning brought an additional Emeryville and a Corte Madera. So despite the fact that I had friends in town, I got up early on Saturday to do all my pickups and deliveries. It turned out to be harder than I thought it would be.

On the way to Sacramento it was pouring and the wind was blowing something fierce. As I passed Fairfield going east on 80 there was so much water coming from the west that the waves were lapping over the concrete divider of the freeway. But things seemed to be holding up, so I continued up to Sacramento.

Maybe 10 minutes later I saw a 90s Camaro do a complete 360 traveling at roughly 70 mph. It was truly amazing. All of a sudden his headlights started to rotate toward me (I was in the fast lane, and he was one lane over), but his speed and direction of travel stayed the same. The Camaro smoothly spun around as it glided across 2 lanes of traffic, finally ending up facing the right direction and damage free on the shoulder. If you set a photograph of a car on an air-hockey table I think you'd get roughly the same movement, which is kind of serene if you don't happen to be driving 70 mph.

One of my destinations in Sac was a pickup as somebody's house. I had called them Friday evening and asked if 11am or so would be a good time to stop by. The lady said that it would, and that's when I showed up. I knocked on the door and listened for signs of life as I checked the door to make sure I was at the right apartment. Maybe 5 minutes later an enormous woman in a night gown answered the door. I stated that I was there to pick up the air mattress, and she grunted and waved me toward a bedroom. In the bedroom with the hospital bed and mattress were two sleeping people. Not wanting to wake the two sleeping people, I didn't turn on my pump to deflate the mattress, nor did I turn on the light so I could adequately see what I was doing. Alas, my efforts were all for naught as about halfway though getting the mattress off the frame, enormous woman #2 (the sleeping one), opened an eye, grunted at me, got up and shuffled into the kitchen where she let out a soul-shaking belch.

I gathered everything up and took it to the van, and came back to have my paperwork signed. While Enormous Woman #1 signed off on the pickup, and Enormous Woman #2 let out another seismically significant burp, Enormous Woman #3 (who hadn't been awakened by the burp noise nor vibration), rolled over and started snoring like her esophagus housed a garbage disposal and somebody was trying to force a spoon down there. As icing on the cake, when I left the house I noticed that I smelled like an ashtray.

When I left Sacramento my boss called and told me that Napa was flooding, and the guy in Corte Madera called to say his power was out. So I put all those off until Sunday and set my sights on Emeryville. No problem I thought. I'll get home a little early I thought. I kind of have to pee, but I'm cruising along and I can wait until Emeryville I thought. Then I hit the traffic.

While I had been listening to a David Rakoff book on tape and not listening to the radio, a levy had broken near Fairfield and 80 was closed in both directions. This, apparently, was the same water I had seen lapping over the divider earlier in the day. And now I was stuck in the after effects, averaging .5 mph, no exit in sight, and bladder that was seriously questioning my Emeryville bathroom decision.

I had encountered this situation once before while stuck in traffic on the Bay Bridge. But in that case I had the distinct advantage of having an empty water bottle handy. No such luck this time. In the spirit of MacGyver I looked around my van for something that might come in handy. And there it was: the candy dish.

During the holidays my company gives out candy dishes with our name and phone number printed on the side. I had been eating the candy out of one during the week, and it was sitting on the passenger seat. With no other options available I empted the remaining candy onto the seat and transformed my candy dish into the worlds smallest plastic urinal, complete with a convenient handle. And since the candy dish doesn't have a screw top, and since there was an awful lot of waste water on the freeway already, I dumped it out the window. Nobody was the wiser, and I felt 100% better.

And that, dear readers, was how I spent New Years Eve day.

Finally Back

I seem to have finally emerged from holiday mode, which consists entirely of working, packing, shopping, or hanging out with family. All of those things are fine and dandy, but they don't leave much time for things like TV, email, phone calls, or blogging. They also, ironically*, don't leave much time for thank-you notes. But since the holidays are over, and the thank-you notes are ready to be mailed, I'm ready to get back into gear.

And while I planned to write about driving around and redistributing mattresses in the great California rains of ought 5, doing the dishes used up my evening. So I'm just going to write about Wendy's.

I had a craving for ground beef today. Wendy's seemed like the natural lunch choice, so I pulled through the drive through and ordered a #2 with a lemonade with no ice. Then I pulled up to the window, handed the guy my $5.58, and put my hand out for my food. He handed me a bag and closed the window.

I knocked on the window and asked if I could have my drink too. He said he was sorry and handed me the drink saying, "Sprite**, right?" Sure, whatever. I took my food and pulled out of the lot, and while I waited for a break in traffic I fished around for a french-fry. No luck.

I drove around the block, parked, and walked into the restaurant to ask for my fries, which they unquestioningly gave me. They must have known that the guy at the drive through was an idiot who often gives people 1/3 of their order. I should have said that he forgot to give me my fries, frosty, and $40 gift certificate.

*I never feel totally comfortable using the word ironic. But it seems like that sentence had a reasonable chance of being correct.

**It was indeed lemonade.

Norbert's water dish is a big Tupperware bowl that lives in my bathroom sink.

Tonight I was sitting in the bathroom shirtlessly contemplating, Norbert came in to keep her* company. To give her something to do, I put a rubber duck in her water dish. She sat on the edge of the sink and pawed it around, splashing water everywhere. She found the experience both exciting and fulfilling. I found it both cold and damp.

*Yeah, I meant her. I don't think she cares if I'm lonely or not.

Whacha Doin' Back There?

There are many problems with nursing homes. Some of them smell, some of them are full of staff that doesn't care at all about the patients, some are so crowded that it's hard to walk down the hall, and some have all these problems. But regardless of how nice or icky a nursing home is, they always have one patient who spends all day wailing. There's a guy at a place in Santa Rosa who shuffles around in his PVC chair asking everybody to help him. That's pretty creepy. And I went to a place today where a guy wailed in such a consistent monotone manner that I was tempted to harmonize with him.

In the same facility there was a guy who liked to walk around behind people and stand very close to them without actually making physical contact. It wasn't like he was sneaking up on anyone. He decided he would stand behind me and had to walk in front of me before he could circle around to my back. When he was satisfied with his performance, he moved on to somebody else. It was very strange.

Maybe if You Squint?



It's a little hard (impossible) to tell from the picture, but this sign says, "'Tis the season to buy sex toys."

Beep Beep, Dinner's Mediocre

There hangs on my wall a little, white device. It winks its light from time to time to let me know it's on the lookout. Through night and day it stays vigilant, ready to leap into action at any moment.

When I'm cooking this little device warns me that whatever I happen to be making is going to turn out poor to middling in the taste department. Beep, the toast was done 30 seconds ago. Beep, that stuff that used to be sauce is now asphalt. Beep, your chicken has developed a crust.

Tonight was no different. I used a little more of my wine, some mushrooms, some garlic, and some onions. if I had stopped there I would have had a really excellent bowl of garlicky mushrooms, but I didn't. I added chicken and burnt the left over juices from cooking the mushrooms to the pan, and dried the outside of the chicken while leaving the inside tender and pink. I like my chicken well-done.

Two more chicken breasts to go. I may resort to my hour-in-foil-in-oven method and stick some pepper jack cheese on top. Cheese makes everything better. Or maybe I will throw the rest of the chicken away and just eat the cheese.

Big Sister

Some of you may remember this little tiny lighter I got at a flea market about a month ago.



Well, this weekend a friend found its big sister. At first glance it looks like a regular, albeit pink, Zippo.



However, only when you give it context can you appreciate the magnitude of the lighter. I'd show you picture of it lit (it's a real working lighter) but I don't have nearly enough lighter fluid. I'll have to make a trip to the barbeque store.

Quiet You!
(And By You, I Mean Me.)

While things are going well with the nurse I've been slowly dating (one date a month on average), she continues to live far away and remains a busy person.

Right as my wasted 3 month subscription to Yahoo Personals had run out a girl sent me a message containing her email address. With things as they are with my nurse, I decided that I should try and see if this other girl and I might get along. If nothing else, we seemed to have a lot in common and maybe we could be friends.

After a couple emails I called her on Saturday and we decided to go out Saturday night. I went to pick her up from her house which was a little hard to find, but I drove right there without any wrong turns or back-tracking. I can point to that fact as my single accomplishment for the evening.

Do you ever have one of those nights when you can't make yourself shut up? Mostly I don't have those nights. Mostly I have nights where my brain decides to stay home with the conversation when I leave for a date. While uncomfortable silence is not usually something to hope for, it would have been great on Saturday.

When, quite understandably, asked what an inflatable medical mattress was for, I embarked on a long, detailed, and disgusting monolog about bedsores, skin breakdown, hospice patients, and the Polaroid of the 90 year old man's ass. Later, when she asked what my average weekend was like, I took it upon myself to explain how most of my friends went to Tahoe this weekend without inviting me and how I don't go out a whole lot for some reason. (I also made a long and stilted joke about people in tin suits accidentally soldering themselves into immobility and someone discovering them years later, the whole ordeal being like a solder based Pompeii. However, I'm not sure whether to count that in the plus or minus column.)

On top of my interminable blathering, I could not for the life of me drive where I wanted to go. We tried to see Memoirs of a Geisha, but it was only playing near Union Square, home of the holiday shoppers and no parking. Instead of heading right for the parking garage I circled the block looking for street parking. That's my normal M.O., but there was so much traffic that circling the block took a half hour.

After it became obvious that we weren't going to make Memoirs, we decided to go to a theater in Daly City. On the way there I got on the freeway, missed an exit, got off the freeway, drove through the city to get back to the freeway, missed another exit, turned around, and finally arrived at the theater. On the way to take her home I took the wrong entrance and got back on the freeway, off again, on again, and then finally made it to 19th Ave. When I pulled up to her house she had the door open before I had completely stopped the car. I imagine she was tired of driving after being the car for a combined total of nearly and hour and a half.

I think there's an excellent chance I've disqualified myself from even the friend zone, which is too bad because I think we have a lot of the same musical and comedy related interests. None the less, it's completely understandable if she doesn't want to talk to me again. I wouldn't want to talk to a navigationally challenged, morbid, bedsore-obsessed, guy with no friends either.*


*I want to point out that I don't actually view myself that way.**

**I need to point that out so I don't get another self-help book in the mail from my mom.

Tastephone

Last night I dreamed, among other things, that I was working for a deli as the over-the-phone taste demonstrator. It wasn't clear how it worked, but when somebody called I would pick up the phone and eat things to they could have some idea of what they tasted like. The first lady who called really like the pepper jack and roast beef combo, but she still wanted me to taste the ham which was unfortunate because I don't like ham.

I may too much of a picky eater to get a position at the tastephone in real life.

She's Back

And she's contentedly curled up between my keyboard and screen making it hard to see what I'm typing.

Norbert is just as cute as she was when she left, and remains as sharp. Within the first hour she was back she bit me 3 times. The first two were for waking her up by petting her too hard, and the last one was for taking away a screw she was trying to eat. (I didn't get a chance to cat-proof my apartment before she came home.)

And then, to really induct her back into my little apartment, she flipped out and attacked me after I rubbed be belly for just a little too long.

We are truly a dysfunctional couple.

Spell Check Catastrophe

Or very nearly one. I was writing to a girl from Yahoo Personals who asked me if I play my own songs or mostly do covers. What I was trying to write was

I do some of my own stuff, but I'm such a slow and sporadic songwriter that mostly I play covers.

But because I spelled sporadic, sparatic, spell check tried to make the sentence:

I do some of my own stuff, but I'm such a slow and spermatic songwriter that mostly I play covers.

I'm not sure what a spermatic songwriter is, but it sounds messy, and certainly not how I want to identify myself.

Little Colored Spots

We use a lot of pens at work. Permanent pens for writing on huge plastic mattress bags, ballpoint pens for the mountains of paperwork, and highlighters for no reason at all.

Once in a while one of these pens will go rogue and start ruining stuff. The guy who cleans the mattresses put his smock in the wash with a green permanent marker in the pocket. Now he has a perfectly polka dotted outfit.

Yesterday a pen, and we have yet to determine which one, started squirting ink all over its compatriots. This pen seems to be going, perhaps under cover of night, from pen box to pen box spreading its pen goo everywhere. So for the second day in a row I've come home with the hands of a 90 year old. (No, I didn't just change the subject. We never get body parts in the mattresses, not even from hospice accounts.) It looks like I'm developing liver spots.

Although I think I'd rather have liver spots than a big ink smear on my cheek as my supervisor did about mid afternoon on Monday. And it was still there at 5pm. Maybe he was getting all gussied up for his anniversary today.

Real Quick

I was checking one of my various email accounts when I noticed an ad for the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show tomorrow night. On the ad there's a link which made me laugh:

Video: 10 Years of Sexy.

I like the phrase 10 years of sexy. I'm not even sure how to use it. "Oooh, she is 10 years of sexy." Or maybe "She had about 10 years of sexy, but now she's but now I'd describe her as being handsome." Or even, "You know, Phyllis, I've given you 10 years of sexy and now I'm tired. These love handles are here to stay."

Friday

Norbert comes back on Friday, but only temporarily. I'm cat sitting my cat for a month before she becomes someone else's cat for good. Maybe she'll give me more to write about. At the moment I have a serious lack of things to say.

Half way cooking some burritos for dinner I thought I might write another "Cooking with Michael" thing after dropping the beans in the sink, buying low fat beans instead of regular fat beans, forgetting the olives, and coming home with ground pork instead of my intended ground beef. But low and behold, they turned out fine.

It's a sad day when even my cooking doesn't lend itself to blogging.

It's Been Years

Or maybe it's been more like a week. None the less, here I am creating a post with a week's worth of nothing to say.

First off I'd like to point out that I really truly don't have anything to do with Norbert's blog. This is not to say that I haven't enjoyed the three posts which have graced its page, but it was pointed out to me today that it would be really weird if I was the one writing it. But I'm not, so it isn't.

Last week I delivered some things to what, from the outside, looked like a normal 2 or 3 bedroom house. Not so.

Making a single, unbroken line across the walls of the house was what must be some muscular crown molding. Every 2 feet there was a 3'x4' painting of a King, Queen, Knight, Prince, or some other royal looking torso. And each painting was framed in a good 4 inches of ornate gold painted wood frame. The hallways were lines with little antique tables and there was a grand piano taking up most of the living room.

The entire house looked like it belonged inside an old English manor house - one which all the other manor houses agree is trying too hard to fit in.

And then I saw the kitchen. Yellow and brown and linoleum, straight out of 1978. I guess it's hard to be 100% consistent.

They guy's wife was interesting too. She kept flitting between surprise and indignation, separated by only fleeting moments of calm. Her eyes opened wide and she put her hands to her cheeks Macaulay Culkin style when she I showed her how the pump hooks to the bed. (You hang it on the foot of the bed. Really, it's that simple.) She threw her hands up in outrage when relating the story of how the woman who delivered the medication box left it near the front door. Why, she could never lift such a heavy box! I offered to move it to the kitchen. It weighed roughly the same as a gallon of milk.

But she was very nice. As I was leaving she told me I was both very nice and very handsome, and that she hoped I had a nice girlfriend. When I said that I didn't just at the moment she told me that when her husband saw her that was it - He was done with dating. I assume that she meant that it was love at first sight, not that he chose that moment to give up. The second reading makes for a terribly depressing anecdote.

Yuck

They've done it to me again, those rotten vegans. First they pretend to serve pizza, and now this.

I hadn't had lunch yet, I was starving, I was late for a delivery, and I needed to get gas. While the van was filling up I ran into the station to get some sort of gas station snack. And there, on a shelf next to the moon-pies, was a great big espresso chip cookie calling out to me.

Perfect, I thought. What could be better than an espresso chip cookie? I tell you what: A cookie containing butter, eggs, and real chocolate. After I took my first bite of the cookie (and nearly blew it onto my windshield) I peered closely at the label. To my great dismay I discovered that I had purchased a vegan cookie.

Who sells vegan food at a gas station? If they sold bio diesel I might look more closely at the snacks, but there was just no indication that there might be stealth vegan cookies running around. I'm writing to the FDA. There needs to be some gargantuan mandated labels on the front of vegan food that says, "Warning, this food contains substitutes for all the ingredients that make it taste good. Eat with caution, as it may taste like ass."

Now You See Her

And now I don't.

My friend just came by to pick up Norbert, and Norbert was none too pleased. I figured I could hold her when I answered the door and introduce everybody, but 12 scratches on my arms go a long was in explaining how that went.

But after 3 minutes of explaining her eccentricities, 7 minutes of packing up her stuff, 15 minutes of trying to get her out from under the bed, and 5 minutes trying to get her into the cat carrier, she's finally gone.

I miss her already, but not in the way I might if we'd gotten along 100% of the time. I was trying to get in some last minute quality time with her and she attached her claws to my scalp and bit me on the head. Maybe that was just her way of saying goodbye.

Flea Market

I've found that I really enjoy flea markets. For whatever reason I like to look through everybody else's weird crap. And it turns out that every Sunday there's a flea market not too far from my house which has all the weird crap you could ever want, and some you would never want.

Among the things that I did want where a number of interesting and ornate lighters, a gold encrusted rotary dial phone a 3 foot tall golden pedestal ($50), a grinder, a little tiny cordless skill-saw, and any number of weird old electronics of questionable functionality. My favorite of those was a vacuum tube tester. If I lived in a bigger place and had lots of money my house would be covered floor to ceiling in that stuff.

I did purchase two lighters, one of which is the tiniest lighter I've ever seen.



After I clipped off a piece of flint from one of my Zippos, fiddled with the wick, and refilled the reservoir it lit right up. It's so cute.



The weirdest thing I saw for sale was a Nazi arm band. I have to wonder about that. Who would sell Nazi things at a flea market? I mean, I think it's kind of weird to sell Nazi things at all, but at a flea market? I picture flea market Nazi arm bands being made out of felt on somebody's RV kitchen table the night before. Disturbing.

I feel like it's weird that I check my own cat's blog to see if she's posted anything. Especially because mostly she hasn't

Friendsteram

I've noticed that websites like MySpace and Friendster have started getting spam profiles. A website will set up there and then ask you to be its friend. But the most evil of these spam things is the mail order bride profiles.

Here I am checking my email when I see a girl named Merry has sent me a wink on Friendster. I wasn't sure what a wink was, but it sounded good so I checked her out. Turns out she's from Indonesia which is terribly inconvenient. I did, however, enjoy her About Me statement: "My friends said that I'm energic and friendly...I like gathering with friends. I don't like to give up. God is nice*."

It sounds like she’s little overly religious for me, but she’s got moxie and I like that.



*I believe "God is nice" is from Isaac 3:35

And Isaac bespoke to Jesus, "So what's God like?"

And Jesus replied, "God, well, God is nice."

Befuddled by what Jesus speaketh, Isaac asked, "Really? Just nice? Not luminescent or magnanimous or, I don't know, great? I was expecting some more sparkling adjectives."

Jesus sighed and explained, "Yeah, no, he is. He's pretty great. I've just been feeling down lately because I feel like I don't get any credit for things. I make wine from water, I heal people, I come back from the dead, although that's later, and still all anyone can talk about is how God created everything, and thank you lord for this food. And have you seen the food? Most of it really nothing to be thankful for."

Right then Isaac decided he should cheer Jesus up with a big dinner party with all of his friend. He'd serve some fishes and maybe those loafs Jesus likes to much.

Holy Crap

My cat has started a blog. I wonder if she'll write about what the hell happened in my bathroom today.

(For those of you who haven't been paying close attention to the comments, I swear up and down that I have zero to do with Norbert's blog.)

Thursday's Reign of Destruction

Today started out ok. It was 75 and sunny again and the various talk shows on my local NPR affiliate were interesting enough. And then came lunch.

I was in kind of a rush to find some lunch as I hadn't scheduled my deliveries very well and it was 2:30pm by the time I was free. I ended up in Sebastopol which isn't my normal stomping ground, so the restaurants there are foreign to me.

As I drove by a strip mall I noticed a little place that said "Restaurant" above the door. I was indeed searching for a restaurant, and the little window decal declaring that they sell pizza by the slice sealed the deal. I went in and ordered a slice of "Italian Cheese Pizza" and a pink grapefruit juice squeeze, then sat down at a table.

They guy who had taken my order brought over my juice squeeze and a warm iceless glass of water with some stuff floating in it. The couple at the table next to me got the same glass of floaters and they inquired as to what it was. They guy said it was lemon, but upon taking a sip of my water, I detected not a hint of lemon. I concentrated on my juice squeeze.

When my pizza arrived I was thoroughly unimpressed. It looked like a Safeway select frozen pizza, and it tasted like the chef had undercooked the box. The dough was oddly hard, and yet felt undercooked at the edges. The cheese wasn't really melty or stringy as cheese should be. It was the taste and consistency of pizza-temperature wax. (Although I'm sure many a scented candle has more taste than this cheese did.)

When I went to pay, the guy asked how the slice was, and just as I was answering I read his shirt: "Slice of Life, Vegan Cuisine." "Um, good," I responded. On the way back to the depot I stopped to buy a Häagen Dazs bar.

When I got home I checked my email, played with Norbert for a while, and then ventured into the bathroom to contemplate life for a while. My contemplation was put on hold as I rounded the corner and discovered glass covering the floor and filling the tub. Apparently while I was at work my right shower door exploded. My first thought was that Norbert was somehow involved, but I was assured that shower doors are made of tempered glass and I would be hard pressed to break it even if I fired Norbert out of a cannon right into the door. (Which I was tempted to do when I first saw the destruction.)

So my shower is out of commission for a day or two. (I really hope it's not more.) And I'm pretty sure my landlord thinks I did it. I'm hoping her parents were home and heard it break sometime between the hours of 8am and 5pm when I was safely North of the Golden Gate Bridge. I want them to know that it wasn't my fault so they can feel bad about me having to scrounge around borrowing people's showers.

High Fiber Shower

This morning I fixed my self a bowl of grape-nuts (with Splenda, I don't own sugar) and sat down on the couch to eat it and to watch some TV. Norbert, feeling sociable, hopped up on my lap to try to stick her nose in my cereal. I shooed her away and she settled back down on my lap. When I reached down to pick up the remote, Norbert perked up seeing an opportunity to strike. She reared back, and with all her might, took a downward swipe at the unattended spoon handle thereby flinging soggy grape-nuts everywhere. And I do mean everywhere. They got on the remote, the floor, my bathrobe, my couch, my face, and the coffee table. In fact they got on everything but Norbert.

I think it was premeditated.

Quite the Tuesday

Thank the heavens; Norbert may have a new mom. A friend in Oakland says she may want her, and that's fine by me. Plus she has a really nice place full of natural light and views of the outside.

I'm going to drop her off about a week from tonight for a 5 day trail run. Best case scenario is that Norbert will have a new home with more company and lots of extra space in which to frolic. Worst case scenario is that I've found somebody to cat sit while I go to Portland for Thanksgiving. (In the worst case scenario it will be hard to pry Norbert away from her fancy new digs.)

In other good news, it's November 15th. NOVEMBER. And at 7:30pm tonight it was 67 degrees and 50% humidity. Earlier it was in the mid 70s and I rode my scooter around for about an hour. According to W the jury is still out on the whole global warming issue. But I think somebody should take a serious look at how we managed to get our seasons backwards here.

What Now?

I'm still encumbered by my Norbert problem. (Problemo de Norbert) The advice I've received has ranged from, "yeah, it's probably best to give her away" to "you need two cats." Either one might fix my situation, both could make it worse.

I took Friday off, and all weekend Norbert and I had a good time. She slept on my chest on no less than 4 occasions, and flopped on my nose a time or too as well. She even started responding to "no!" Could it be that she had been taking English classes? Could she have finally grown out of being a turd?

No. As I type this I have 3 fresh scratches on my right shoulder, 2 fairly deep scratches between my shoulder blades, and kind of a welt thing on my wrist. Norbert has made zero progress. I think she was just happy to have somebody around all day.

This theory lends credence to the 2 cat theory of apartment wellbeing. Unfortunately my apartment is very small. Also, the SFSPCA requires proof that I can have a pet which would require me to ask my landlady to write me a letter saying that pets are ok. She's not big on putting things in writing, so adoption is out. And regardless of how I obtained a second cat, I need some sort or return policy so I have an out if it turns out that I just doubled my problem.

To top it all off, I haven't heard from the friend that gave Norbert to me in the first place. And I think it would be difficult to give her to somebody outside Northern California. So I think my best bet at this point would be to try out the re-homing program at the SFSPCA, assuming Norbert passes the behavior test which is a great big if.

Does your cat have any behavioral quarks?
Aside from:
-splashing water everywhere
-scratching
-biting
-shooting kitty litter outside the confines of a fully enclosed litter box
-trying to claw me under the covers while I sleep

No. She's a dream cat.

I will give her this - she has truly changed my life. Here is one telling example:

I used to wash my sheets once every, oh, say, 2-6 months. I know, gross. But since I was the only one sleeping in them it didn't matter that much. Now I wash my sheets once a week. Why have I so drastically upped the frequency? It takes 5 or 6 days for the combination of bloodspots and kitty litter to get really annoying, and I do my laundry on Sundays.

Master of Love

Having trouble with your relationship? You should hire me to come fix it, at least in the short term. I seem to have the ability to make girls cling to their boyfriends with a mere glance.

I went to see My Morning Jacket at the Fillmore last night. To summarize the parts of evening which are not related to the subject at hand real quick: The show was okay, the Fillmore gives away free apples and I ate two, and on the way back to my car I found a orange mesh-back hat which says "Jägermeister Musicians Tour" on the front, and I had a shepherd's pie for dinner. All and all a relatively good night.

Anyhow, back to my special powers. In the midst of getting a little bored with the show I started to look around at my fellow concert goers and rediscovered the fact that hot girls go to concerts. I feel like any 10 girls from regular life would lose out to any group of 10 from a concert in a beauty contest. I don't know why this is, but I always find it to be so when I go to a show. You know? Whoa. Go with the flow, Joe. Yo!

As I was looking around at all concert ladies, I noticed that every time I looked at one she would immediately clamp on to her boyfriend. Sometimes a girl who had seemingly come alone would create a boyfriend from thin air and clamp on to him. I believe that it was Einstein who postulated that matter can neither be created nor destroyed, i.e. you can't make something from nothing. But apparently with one look from me the laws are physics are no match for love.

I'm not sure what all this means, but I've narrowed it down to 2 conclusions. 1) I have magical powers ala Aphrodite. 2) I'm even creepier than I previously assumed. So creepy I can call boyfriends into existence with a simple glance.

Decisions, Decisions

As I mentioned in verse, Norbert is driving me nuts. It's not like this is news to anyone. I've often complained that she bites me a lot, and that she scratches me to a lesser extent. But I think I'm getting to the point where I'm weighing the costs and benefits, and the benefits are nearly microscopic.

1.38% of my time is spent in quality cat snuggle time on a good day. 45 seconds or so is right when I get home from work, and the other 15 minutes is at about 10:30 (a half hour after I would rather be asleep) when she flops down on my face and likes to be scratched.

She spends 10 hours alone on the best of days. And that's 10 when I'm physically not there. She spends another 7ish with me there but asleep. (Minus a minute here and there where I wake up suddenly and pry her claws off my leg.) All that alone time can't be fun for her and it probably leads to her being a pain in the ass when I am actually home.

During those 17 hours where she can set her own priorities she likes to do a number of things: Throw things on the floor, shred paper products, spread kitty litter everywhere (on the couch, on my bed, under my bed, under my covers), splash around in her water dish and get cat prints everywhere.

So I feel bad for her and I feel bad for me. It was really nice of my friend to bring me a kitten, but I'm thinking that I'm just not ready to be a dad. I need to ask my friend in LA if I can give her back.

Failing that, does anyone want an indoor cat? I'm sure she'd be happier with other cat friends, or with somebody who was home more often. Or somebody who lived in a wading pool. Seriously, I've never met a cat that so enjoyed getting wet.

Cooking With Michael
Your irregular guide to what not to do in the kitchen.

This morning I spent 15 minutes making a cup of hot cocoa. 15 minutes isn't bad you say. Good for you for not using the microwave you say. I used the microwave.

My mom suggested that a nice thing to have for breakfast or desert would be hot cocoa flavored with Splenda. Since I like sweet chocolate things and yet still want my love handles/gut to go away, the Splenda cocoa sounded like a good idea.

My first problem with the whole deal was paying $6 for what felt like a box of air. 2 lbs of sugar and 3.8 oz of Splenda come in the same sized box, and reading $1.58 per oz on the tag gave me pause.

After I had my box of Splenda, then I went looking for hot cocoa. It turns out that there's no drink cocoa, only baking cocoa. Ah, the magic of food.

When I embarked on my cocoa creation this morning I had a heck of a time getting into the Splenda box. My brown sugar box has nice flaps on top that re-close. Not Splenda. It has heavily glued flaps that rip when you yank on them. Only tonight did I discover that there's a handy retractable pouring spout on the side.

I also had a hard time getting into the cocoa. They put a foil freshness thing over the opening that I had to stab open with the back of my spoon. I guess I stabbed a little violently, because an overwhelming cloud of cocoa shot out of the hole and settled down over most of my counter. If I keep making this stuff I may need to get a swiffer for the express purpose of swiffing up cocoa dust.

With my Splenda box mutilated and my cocoa box open for business I spooned some cocoa into my mug of milk and stirred. And stirred. And stirred. Turns out that cocoa and cold milk go together like fast paced witty conversation with strangers and me. They just don't mix.

After sloughing a spoon and a half full of cocoa into the sink (and spending 5 minutes trying to de-clump it so it would wash down the drain) I microwaved my milk and tried again to apply cocoa and Splenda. It worked much better, but by that time I had so many cocoa goobers on the side of my mug that I kept getting big chunks of pure cocoa with every other sip.

The correct way to go about things is as follows:

Nuke milk.
Add equal parts Splenda and cocoa.
Stir.
Drink.

I once threw together a pair of wireless headphones out of the wreckage of an old portable phone, and yet the construction hot cocoa befuddles me. I am, apparently, my own special brand of retarded.

Chain Post

I'm getting all behind in my posting and read. It seems I've had a chain post foisted upon me:

3 Things I Want To Do Before I Die:
1. Cook something which somebody will taste and say mmmm and mean it.
2. Have a job where I have to think sometimes.
3. Own a house.

3 Things I Cannot Do:
1. Cook things which end up tasting good.
2. Spell.
3. Set the volume on my radio or tv to odd numbers.

3 Things That Attract Me to the Opposite Sex:
1. Dyed red hair
2. Musical ability
3. If they talk to me

3 Things I Say Most Often:
1. Fancy
2. Ow, Norbert!
3. I really don't need to eat this cookie.

3 Celebrity Crushes:
1. Laetitia Casta
2. Scarlet Johansson
3. Angelina Jolie, though I think I'd be scared of her in person.

News of the Norbie

Norbert likes pouncing on a freshly swept pile of kitty litter. Then she likes to run away thereby spreading it back across the livitchen.

Norbert likes to play high low. The point of high low is to choose things which are not yet on the floor, and push them onto the floor. These things include clocks, writing utensils, CDs, vitamin bottles, remotes - anything with a lower coefficient of friction than she has. High low is the reason my mouse pad is taped to my desk.

Norbert has trouble with transparent/translucent things. To reduce the meowing I've taken to putting a Tupperware bowl full of water in my bathroom sink and her water bottle has been relegated to the cupboard. With the bowl in the sink, when she splashes around in it all the water goes down the drain and not across the floor. But since it is in the sink she has to bend down quiet a bit to drink. So on Friday I was sitting on the toilet and I decided to hold the bowl up for her. She looked down at the bowl, and swiped a paw well underneath it. Then she lowered her face and took another swipe, still well above and below, respectively. 4 or 5 swipes later her paw was just as far away as it was from the beginning, but she'd gotten a snoot full of water. She snorted it out and started over. Swipe, lean, swipe, lean, swipe, lean, snort. After 3 more repeat performances I set the bowl back down for fear she might drown. I would hate to fill out her little headstone:

Norbert Kadel
2005 - Later in 2005
She was cute and soft, but not very bright. Also, she was sharp. Very sharp. Literally, not mentally.

Good Friday

But not in the religious sense.

I started off my day with the pick-up of an in-home bed frame. Retrieving a bed frame does not a good day make, but the context surrounding the pick-up made it worth while.

As I was taking apart the frame the little Filipina caregiver lady fired questions at me and her 20ish year old niece wandered around trying to look busy. Why does this other bed only have 2 wheel locks? Why is the mattress so heavy? Do I need help loading the van? Why is the foam mattress not a rental? Why doesn't the other company come get their wheelchair? Am I married?

Whoa there.

Me: No.
Caregiver: But you have a girlfriend?
Me: No, not at the moment.
CG: Well, if you are looking, Melina [her niece] is available.
Melina (looking joyfully embarrassed): Oh stop!
CG: I'm just saying to her, if you are looking for a boyfriend you just wait until Michael gets here. He is a fine looking boy.
Melina: Auntie!

Unsure of what to do I smiled and continued loading the bed frame into my van. When I was done both of them made a point of saying individual goodbyes.

It’s not that Melina was undatable or anything, but that’s not really how I work. Generally I work on the internet. Does anyone work like that? Here, date my daughter. Ok, thanks. Weird.

Then on my way home at the end of the day I stopped for gas and some cinnamon bears. I discovered upon my first bite that they were fresh off the bear vine. Or out of the bear extruder. Whatever. They had just recently come from wherever it is that cinnamon bears come from. Mmmm, fresh bears.

Let's Go Out To The Movies

Last night I went to see Shopgirl staring Clair Danes and Steve Martin. The movie was adapted from a novel by Steve Martin. The movie is narrated by Steve Martin.

Generally I like Steve Martin. I can't speak to his ability to write novels as I haven't read any of his work. But I am convinced about his ability to adapt his novels into movies. Shopgirl was terrible.

There were several notable problems with it. First and foremost being that it didn't make any sense. It was as if they started out with waaay too much movie and they had to sacrifice all the scenes which made the plot cohesive. It was just a series of vaguely connected vignettes.

Really great movies have good dialog. Or at least good chemistry between actors. This had terrible dialog and all of the on screen interactions made me feel uncomfortable. And I don't know if this counts as dialog, but I found the narration to be really disconcerting. Steve Martin plays Ray Porter. But Steve Martin also narrates from kind of an omniscient point of view. (Can you have a point of view if you are omniscient?) So he ends up referring to himself in the third person. "As Ray Porter watches her walk away..." Is he narrating as Ray Porter? Is he narrating as Steve Martin outside the context of the movie? Did the original narrator quit with no notice?

The other problems were just weird plot elements. What's Jeremy doing just off stage with an amp? Whose amp breaks in the middle of a set? I mean really. Who gave this band such a nice tour bus? They aren't a very good band. I realize none of this stuff makes sense without context, but rest assured that if you had context you would know what I was referring to, but it still wouldn't make any sense.

The single positive aspect of the movie is seeing a lot of Clair Danes. A LOT. She has a semi-nude scene, an actual nude scene, an obscured nude scene, and 3594 scenes of her shaving her legs in between. Unfortunately the movies timeline is a little hard to follow, so I'm not sure if those leg shaving scenes constitute really smooth legs or just regular smooth legs.

Either way I would wait until it comes out on DVD and then rent something else.