cell one

Sharaun asked that I stay home from work today, as she’s not quite ready to go it alone. It’s fine with me; really. The weekend was largely uneventful, you can read about it all out-of-order in the paragraphs I wrote below. Saturday was spent being Mr. Domestic… cooking, cleaning, and administering Vicodin at the proper intervals. Sunday we slept in, and in the evening Pat and Cynthia graciously came over and cooked lasagna, while Kristi and Erik chipped with a salad and some homemade toppings for the ice cream. I heard it said once (and I bet I’ve even said it on here before) that, in your twenties, your friends are your family. I couldn’t agree more.

As life goes on, I get more torn about using my weekends to sleep. It used to be that I’d look forward to Saturday and Sunday because I could sleep until 10am, or later. Lately though, I’ve been trying to get up at my normal hour even on weekends – all out of the desire to be awake and use as much of my offtime as possible… even if it’s to sit around doing nothing. It’s easier when the mornings are bright and cool, the kind of mornings that just call you to yardwork. Winter makes it more difficult, and rain makes it near impossible. When I roll over and hear rain, nothing seems more appropriate than another hour of slumber.

This weekend, I installed this cool little script that integrates with Winamp (my MP3 player of choice) and uploads data about what you’re listening to. So, when I’ve got Winamp open, it’ll show what I’m hearing real-time. I modified the script a bit to make the artist names clickable to a Google search. The style sheet was being stubborn, so the links are blue… even though I wanted them plain black. It’s a nifty little plugin and I can configure it to work through the proxy at work… enabling the world to see what I’m rockin’ to as I slave away for the man. You can check out the list at the very bottom of the sidebar on the right. I’m all about content… or something.

Being house-bound to look after Sharaun’s post-surgery needs isn’t that bad, or, at least wasn’t that bad today. I managed to get quite a bit done: de-Christmas’d the house, including using the one hour of non-rain all day to climb up on the roof and take down the house lights. Also managed to finally clean out the guest room (which also doubles as the “junk” room when we have no guests). Anyway, I also felt pretty good about managing things with Sharaun… making sure I kept a steady flow of Vicodin in her blood, making her some oatmeal for breakfast, a grilled-cheese for lunch, and some soup for dinner. Now, if that’s not a sickness-tailored menu, I don’t know what is. She seems to be doing well, putting weight on the surgered knee and doing the exercises her doctor recommended. Not much complaining either, which is good.

I’ve talked before about my tendency to let the mail “go.” Since I’m the one that does the finances, I’m usually the one who collects the mail. Lately, I’ve taken to doing this only once a week. I don’t need the mail anymore. For me, it’s gone the way of the print newspaper. I mean, I realize that there’s still a lot we need mail for (like receiving goods bought on Ebay and stuff), but I care less and less about the ceaseless crap we get. Every day, I could choose to refinance my house with any of the five mortgage offers we receive. I also believe I could hold the world record for most credit cards held if I responded to the pile of crap we get daily. Recently, however, I’ve gone beyond just neglecting to check the mail… I’ve started to not even read the dang stuff. I have a huge pile here in front of my monitor… just sitting there. It sucks, because I know there must be at least a couple bills in there that I haven’t even looked at (the damned stone-age holdover ones that still don’t offer online or automated payments). I don’t know what to do with it all. Bank statements for instance… for some reason I feel like I should save these. Why? I dunno. All I do is cram them in a drawer and throw them away eventually. Again, paper mail is dumb… sorry to ramble.

Although it may sound stupid, and uber-Californian, I’ve been thinking lately how I’d like to write a screenplay or book. I did some research online, and found out that there’s a lot of crap that goes into either, but I was more intrigued by the screenplay thing. I downloaded an OpenOffice template to aide in screenplay formatting (these things have formatting rules that are more strict than my 10th grade term papers), and read up on the do’s and don’ts of the whole process. The rigidity of the whole process took a lot of steam of my initial idea, there seem to be so many rules… I think reading a good book on the whole process would be advisable before every putting pen to paper (just a colloquialism people, you know I can barely hold a pen anymore for typing). Anyway, there are several really cool sites out there to help aspiring screenwriters, but one of the coolest I’ve found is johnaugust.com. Mr. August wrote the screenplays for Go and Big Fish, and he actually offers the real things as downloads on his site. He offers the original spec (speculative) scripts, final shooting scripts, and does frequent reader Q&As on his blog. Really cool, although I can’t really tell if I’m serious about trying to write something.

Man, I’ve seen so many “top” lists for 2004’s musical output, and this dang TV On The Radio album shows up high on every one. I remember downloading it when it first came out, and hating it. But, with all these people saying it’s so good, I decided to give it another try. Guess what, I should’ve trusted my instincts… it’s not my bag at all. Toplists are sometimes really good at opening my ears to new tunes, and in some cases re-opening my ears to things too hastily shelved. Some of the albums that scored high across multiple top lists really surprise me. Fiery Furnaces?, that album blew. Bjork?, that album blew. Devandra Banhart?, that album blew. I won’t go so far as to disparage you, dear reader, should you like these albums… after all, you’re certainly not alone… however, you also have no taste.

Good night my friends.

Also written on this day...

• the breakbone - 2011
• shepherd's pie - 2008
• my lungs were made of glass - 2007
• all the way to the horizon - 2006