My computer has been having random internet issues all day. Sometimes I can’t access anything online. At the moment, I can browse the web, but Instant messenger doesn’t work at all.

This is for the best really… I rest a lot more when I can’t get online. As a result, my cold is a lot better than it was, though the headache part of it just won’t go away. It’s vaguely reminiscent of a hangover… Waking up means being cognizant of pain. ah well. At least I have the luxury of having time to rest. Monacita has been blazing through work and volunteer time with her cold.

Bah. I wish I had instant messanger right now, I feel cut off from the world.

My ass may never be the same again.

To explain more fully, I should backtrack a little….

One day at church, the minister announced that the church hosts polls as a sort of church fundraiser. In prior years people had served at the polls (on site at the church) and turned the pay they earned over to the church as a donation. Last year they’d hosted two precincts, this year they hoped to host three. They asked members of the congregation to sign up. Monacita and I decided it could be fun, and both signed up for an afternoon shift. Due to lack of planning on our part, we didn’t sign up for the same precinct, but we figured it didn’t really matter. Later on it occurred that our lack of forethought could even be a plus… Poll workers take breaks in shifts, one off at a time so that the poll center is never understaffed. So if we were working two technically different precincts, perhaps we could have dinner together. (The afternoon shift runs from 1:30 PM tile the polls close at 8 PM, plus however long it takes to clean up and make sure everything is accounted for.)

This was great in theory, until Monacita looked at the letter they sent me and noticed that I wasn’t assigned to St. John’s, but instead to a local convalescent hospital. Oops.

Oh well. There is a class that is available to poll workers, and they pay $20.00 if you take it. Monacita and I attended tonight’s class at the local elementary school. I followed Monacita into the school multi-use room where about 70 senior citizens and other up-right pillars of the community stared at me in my Hawaiian print shirt and backwards baseball cap. The only thing I could have done to be more obnoxious was to show up in my “I’m here about the blowjob” tee shirt. I’m thinking about wearing it for the election.

We then spent almost 2 hours sitting on insanely painful metal folding chairs. I swear, the only reason I didn’t fall asleep is because my ass was in too much pain. Monacita retreated to her hobby of making up stories in her head – during a lull in the presentation I asked how she was doing and she damn near jumped out of her seat in startlement.

People asked a lot of odd and dumb questions, mostly at inappropriate moments. It’s AMAZING the number of people who just don’t understand the phrase “please save your questions for the end of the presentation.” One woman in red plaid flannel was particularly bad.. In the end the guy doing the presentation took to just ignoring her. Monacita now has a piece of paper listing the locations of the classes, with questions scrawled in the margins including: “what if you recognize someone trying to vote from the Mothership? If they gave you an anal probe, does that count as a felony?” I giggled inappropriately throughout the presentation. During the quiz section, I played Final Fantasy Tactics (I love my Game Boy) and Monacita borrowed Critter (my Palm) and played Bejeweled. In a room of about 100 people, I think there were only 4 of us under the age of 40. Suffice to say after the meeting, there was a large caravan of cars heading back to Rossmore. The aliens were out in force!

Make that THREE credit card offers from American Express to a fictional company that I haven’t used the name of in 5 years. Think they’re desperate?

Holy shit, American Express sent me an offer for a business gold card…. for Psycho Enterprises.

Shame they’re about 5 years too late… if they’d offered this to me abut 5 years ago, I would have taken it in a heart beat.

Oh well. Their loss.

Still… how completely random. I haven’t used the name Psycho Enterprises on anything in years.

Hmm…. Psycho Enterprises, the company that brings you soap?

nah….

(speaking of which….)

12 of the 20 bars we made on Valentine’s Day. Not traditional I guess, but it was a lot of fun. The weird big round ones are pieces of loofah with soap poured into them. The one with the foliage has green tea in the soap.

My new tattoo

Sunday night I got talked into running the next D&D game. (Admittedly, I sort of wanted to be talked into it.) I’ve spent the last two days reading incessantly to try and figure out what I’m going to do for this game. Because it’s me, it will probably be something huge and unnecessarily difficult, but what the hell. If I’m gonna kill myself for this, it should be for something I like.

I just got email from a random newbie who apparently saw me run through Tiki Cove about 5 hours ago.
She’s stuck and can’t move. Logging out doesn’t help.

I never even spoke to this person.

Note to self: Don’t enter newbie zones EVER.

And now, always a favourite with my dial-up fans…..

It’s picture time!!!

I saved them slightly smaller this time. And I’m done going through my back pictures, so you shouldn’t have to go through this again for a while.

From left to right: my mother, me, my grandmother. It’s not quite as cool as the one with me as a baby and my great grandmother in it as well, but at least I am old enough to remember this one being taken.

My three cousins (on my mother’s side). Moe is the one holding the other two in head locks. (Larry on the left and Curly on the right)

I wish I hadn’t cut Monacita’s head off here… But in my defense I was REALLY drunk. That’s Monacita hugging Jim, and Michael hugging Tom. (Tom was our host, and Michael is Tom’s acupuncturist who Tom hired to play waiter for the evening.)

That would be Mike, Monacita and Jim… Mike had been “talked” into trying on his first dress. There wasn’t much talking involved really… it’s like trying to talk me into something. “You know you want to…” I’ve seen (but don’t have) pictures of other dress wearing incidents since then. Considering how many of those guys were in dresses in those pictures, I suspect there was even more alcohol present than at this occasion.

More of the promised pics from last Halloween. (My camera doesn’t handle pictures in the dark well) I can’t remember everyone’s names I’m afraid, but the costumes were great. The two on the left were Roy and the tiger, and the two on the left were Carrie White and Tommy Moss (from the movie Carrie). They had watched the movie the night before, and she could do the Carrie stare perfectly.

The Munsters. They really had some incredible Halloween costumes at that party. I still wish the picture of the horde of sailors on the Castro had turned out though.

And last but not least: she’s beautiful when she wants to be.

This morning I dreamt that the real world was similar to the game There in as much as you could teleport to certain places. (But not everywhere) I dreamt that I was running late to meet Furina, and she called me, asking me where I was. I told her I was running late, and that I was sorry, and asked if we could port to the train station we needed to be at. She replied that we couldn’t, that’s why we had to catch the shuttle, but we could port to a nearby shuttle station, and just walk to the big train station. I agreed, got dressed in some sort of weird flamenco costume, and ported there.

I remember that the walk was uphill, and Furina was easily out pacing me because she always walked faster than anyone I know. She stopped for some reason, and I walked past her, and turned my head to look back and make sure she was okay/look and see what she was doing when *wham* I walked into some low lying balcony. It hit the top of my head and I passed out.

In my dream I passed out.

I remember partially coming to, while Furina knelt down next to me to ask if I was okay… I blacked out again, then finally awoke in the dream, then shortly after, in real life. The after affects of my dreamed unconciousness left me disoriented for most of the morning.

It wasn’t a bad dream, but it was definitely one of the weirder ones I’ve had in terms of effect.

Of course, it’s no weirder than the Robin Williams routine I’m currently listening to.

“Shakespeare with a strap-on”

A gentleman from some local police fund raising organization called this evening asking to speak to my mother. I never actually said I was her, but by ignoring the question of whether or not I was (and by asking enough questions of my own… going on the offensive always helps…) he came to that conclusion on his own. We got to discussing biotechnology and the economy, eventually drifting into travel and music. We discussed how the Japanese koto sounds similar to the Indian sitar, and he told me the name of a gentleman he heard play live once who had an electric banjo rigged to sound like a Sitar. (the performer’s name was Bela Fleck I believe.. That or Beya Fleck. I’ll have to do a search.)

In the end he told me to have a great evening and I told him the same, and he hung up without ever telling me what organization he was with or what he wanted.

I win!!

There is a big wonderful world out there that I participated in last weekend.

Monacita and I ran away to Guerneville for the weekend, indulging in tea, cloves, massages, and in my case, more of my tattoo.

And because I FINALLY found the upload cable to my camera, I can actually SHOW you what the tattoo looks like, as well as some of the other mystery photos I’ve hinted at but never presented.

But before I forget what’s really important:

The BS-o-matic 2.0 Bull shit on demand. It’s Freeware. My life is complete.

Of course, the gun database (so you can keep track of your gun collection at all times in data if not in reality) is always a winner. But since I don’t even own a water gun at the moment, I decided that my $5.00 would be better spent on Thai food. So I should go hop in the shower.

And, unfortunately, the batteries to my camera died mid download, so you’ll all have to wait until they charge so I can finish pulling the images on my computer. But in the meanwhile, here are some of the miscellaneous images that I did manage to download…

Monacita as the drag queen repair crew! (see last Halloween.)

Tom and Drew. (Drew is the one wearing the sequins.)

What really happens after Monacita leaves for work in the morning! (It’s not Polly’s best, but the pug actually has his eyes open.) I’m sure you can guess which one is which.

Polly flirting for the camera. The Puggy Wonder is in his usual state of semi-consciousness.

My mother and her sister and brother in a rare moment of domestic tranquility.

I took this picture of Chance’s monitor. His computer couldn’t manage to render the resulting explosion Great setup though.

A caterpillar I found and fell in love with up at the cabin. After taking extensive photos (and I do mean extensive… about 2 dozen…) I finally took it outside and placed it in some nearby foliage. I like caterpillars….

Before I go, the BS-o-matic sez:

Evolving cross-platform bandwidth because that is repurposing bricks-and-clicks partnerships vis a vis targeting B2B channels.

It works!!

I woke up this morning with what felt like a hangover. This was absurd because I haven’t had any alcohol since the Sangria at Ici’s, and that was more than a week ago. You can also have clove hangovers, but I hadn’t had one of those in a few days. It was then I realized that I had ate like shit yesterday. Is it possible to have a food hangover? The ramifications of that thought are oddly distubing to me.

Last night I had a total temper tantrum about my therapist. Monacita and I talked about it til I quit feeling so angry, but the end result is that I now feel distinctly uncomfortable. In a last ditch effort to deaden these feelings, I turned to reading. It’s a crutch, but not as self destructive as binge eating. Anyway, note to self, do not try to deaden your sense of discomfort with Coyote Blue. Excellent book, but the first half is all about a guy trying to come to grips with his discomfort as his life changes. Oops.

Anyway, Happy Candlemas. I have incense to go make.