It was 60 degrees and sunny the day before. WTF?

And now it's even icy-er and snowier than when I took that picture. It's going to be an exciting walk to work tomorrow!

Apparently there's some new investigation thing about the death of Princess Diana. That's not so interesting as what "some official" said in the following statement:

“The accident was too violent. The internal injuries she suffered were incompatible with life."

Now think about that for a minute...
The...internal...injuries...she...suffered...were...incompatible...with...life

That is about the weirdest phrasing I've ever heard. That kicks pc-speak's ass. Forget about the vertically challenged and the people with disabilities. This woman suffered injuries that were incompatible with life.

I'm floored.

Whew, well that post the other day was miserable, wasn't it?

I got nothin' today. Except...

Henry Rollins -- Tuesday, March 2nd, 2004 -- Tremont Music Hall

And my souvenir from last time...



mmm... Henry Pillins...

Calgon, take me away.

I'm tired of cleaning up cat
a) poop
b) pee
c) puke
d) hair
e) what is THAT thing?

It's probably a good thing I don't have a kid. However, after 5 or 6 years a kid generally learns to clean up its own excretions. (if they're female.)

I'm so exhausted when I get home from work these days. I've had a three day weekend and yet it feels like I never left on Friday. My neck and shoulders and back are one whole sore knot. I would pay for a massage and yet...oh, yeah, I'm working because I don't have the money for that sort of thing!

It's one of those moments where I wish I had someone else living here to do some things.

I come home at 8:30, and cats need to be fed and the litterbox cleaned. Then Cat decides to puke in not one, but FOUR spots on the floor. I heard the heaving begin, and hastily tossed her from the carpeted area she was choosing to the concrete flooring... 860 s.f. in this place, and she wants to pick the 50 square feet in the whole place that has carpet on it to regurgitate stinky tuna flakes.

So now it's 10:30 and I haven't had any supper and all my plans to go downstairs and work out are shot because not only is it so late that I can't work out now or I will be up all night, even if I did, I'm too sore to get a good workout.

Tomorrow is not shaping up to be any better. I will be short another pair of hands (or three) until next week because of some bullshit meeting that requires all the "COM's" to go to Atlanta for three, THREE days. The "genius" of corporate logic escapes me sometimes.

And there's a pile of dishes in the sink, and garbage that needs to be taken out, and recyclables that need...recycling.

I will now be accepting suggestions for vacation locales.

I had a fire in my toaster oven today.

I was making some toast like any other day, and there was smoke coming out of the toaster oven door, so I looked in and some big blob of something black was smoking on the bottom tray. So before the smoke alarm goes off, I thought I should get that to stop. I decided to pull out the crumb tray, so that thing would stop smoking. But instead the tray got stuck on the heating element, and suddenly, I saw small flames! I panicked for a second, but figured that the tray was metal, and as long as the toast didn't catch fire, it would eventually go out. (I remembered to turn the power off anyway!) It did. I didn't burn the house down.

Today's exciting variation on the Elevator Odor saga...

COLOGNE MAN
And I hate to say it but 99% of the time he is a non-white man. WUWT?

Today's dumb customer award goes to the woman who told me,
"Whether it's possible or not, put "CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE" on page 27."

What kind of miracles exactly does she think I work?

My brain is very loud lately. Even when I'm concentrating on something, it feels like there's this white noise or chatter going on in the background that's trying to distract me. I'm worried that it's the new antidepressants. Really it's probably just the over-abundant workload I've had, and added stress. But it's what kept me up way late last night, when I was posting things at the Forums 'round 2 am.

I love my friend Sandy because she has a bumper sticker that says

"If you can't feed em, don't breed em."

I rolled to 78,500 miles on my car last night. That's 78,000 miles I've driven that car, which is a damn lot of miles. (I'm making an exception of 500 miles for my letting other people drive the car at one time or another.)

I had dinner with Sandy the other night and she asked me what kinds of things I hated and/or though sucked so bad. The first thing that occurred to me is how much of my day I spend either waiting for elevators, or waiting for traffic lights. My apt bldg has only one elevator for the north wing of the building, and it services 9 floors. At the peak hours of the day, (rush hour am and pm), there are obviously a bunch of people trying to use it. Plus I think that it's a dumb elevator, that doesn't really stop in one or the other direction to pick up extra floors when it very well could. I could also use the fire stairs, but 8 flights of stairs is not my idea of fun with my acl knee... Not just yet anyway. Not if I want to get to my destination TODAY.

So when I finally get out of my building in the mornings, and I walk to work, I have to cross Graham St. The problem with the part of Graham at 5th and 6th, is that 5th and 6th are one way streets that go east and west respectively. Some city planner decided that because they were one way streets, they didn't need crossing signals in both directions. I guess also when the traffic signals were put in, they didn't have as much residential there as they do now. Anyway, inevitably, I run the risk of being smooshed because I'm not always sure how much time I have before the light changes. Plus drivers in Charlotte are notorious red-light runners, so while the average driver might not go when the light is green if they see me crossing the road, I run the risk of being hit by the guy racing to make the red light. So, long story long, I try to wait out the lights for the next cycle before crossing the street.

Or if it's raining I say fuck it and take the free circulator bus. But then I don't get my good half-mile walk in.

So if I make it to work without dying (3 or 4 more intersections later. Luckily those have crossing signals) I am confronted with the elevator at work fubar. There are technically 8 elevator bays, but no matter when you arrive in the foyer, or when you leave, only about 3 of them seem to be running. Multiply that by 75 people per floor (I'm being generous) and 24 floors and you end up with a mass of annoyed people waiting for the elevator.

Now that it's winter in Charlotte, and we're starting to have some wintery weather, you will no doubt be stuck in the elevator with one of three types of people (or a combination of all):

1. The person that smells like moth balls because they just took their wool coat out of storage.
2. The chronic sniffler. Are you sick, or is it just because it's cold out. Either way, yuk.
3. A smeller of the "I just got coffee", "I just farted", or "I'm wearing too much perfume to cover up the moth ball smell" variety. Phee-you.

And so eventually I get on the elevator in the morning, with the crowding and the smells, and no doubt there will be 10 people in the elevator all going to 10 SEPARATE floors. I'm on 16 so I usually have to wait a while. And the elevator is going up and stopping at every floor, when all of a sudden it decides to stop on a floor for which no one IN the elevator has pressed the button. For the sake of argument, let's say it's "4". So a person gets on at floor "4", and presses the button for "5".

Come on now people, would it kill you to take the stairs once in a while???

So in one of those true twists of fate that almost never happens to people except me, I tell this story to Sandy at dinner Monday night. Tuesday I run the litany of all the things I just went through, and on my way home and down in the elevator, the elevator stops at "5", and a girl gets on a pushes a button for "4". To the rest of us in the elevator she says,

"I'm sorry, but they won't let us take the stairs!"

I don't know how to feel about that, other than maybe I was being taught a lesson.



I guess what all this means is that the majority of my frustrations for the day happen in the half an hour before work every day. And people wonder why I'm not a morning person.

Of course it happens all over again at 5pm. And people wonder why I'm a hermit.

On the plus side, I get it all over with early in the day, and only for a little while again in the evening. And if those are the worst things that happen to me all day (usually they are not but I digress) then I should consider myself very fortunate indeed.

Being all bloggy makes me wonder what happened to (evil)Robbie Reaves. It was his fault I stumbled upon Blogger a few odd years ago, back at the old Waterford Lakes address. I was up late one night, and I think I was looking for something about Minor Threat--Out of Step, and the different pressings of it, etc etc, and somehow, somehow I stumbled upon his blog. He was funny. He and his friends' antics made me laugh. I signed his guestbook and told him I thought he was cool or something. I found out he was like 15 or i don't know what, so I backed the hell off. But we kept a little communication going for a while, pms and emails and the like. He was a good kid. I wonder what happened to him.

Robbie, if you're finally out of Chico, I hope you're doing well. (Ok, even if you're not out of there yet, I hope it's going as well as can be expected...) Drop me a line sometime.

Today's weather:
Sunny and 72 degrees.

IT'S JANUARY 3RD.

I love living in the south.

It was so nice out, I went out to my patio and started an oil painting. I think it's not supposed to rain until Monday, which means the paints will have a couple days to dry before I bring them in.

I forgot how much I loved oils because for the past month I've been working in acrylics. Completely different animal. Acrylics act just like the plastic they are. There's no softness. It's all about definition and drawing and detail. Oils are much more forgiving. You don't even have to try hard to make something that looks good. I spent maybe an hour on my underpainting today, and I already like it better than the acrylic I've spent the last month (more) on. (more-on.)

Today's going to be an interesting day for crowd watching. There's a game uptown tonight vs the Cowboys. Last home game of the season. (Listen to me, like I know shit about football.) The game isn't until 8 pm but at 8:30 this morning there were already people starting to camp out in the parking lots.

I'm trying to think if I have anywhere to go to avoid the madness, but I really can't think of anything.
Uptown Charlotte is always...er...interesting under extreme crowds of people. Especially drunk ones. See "New Years Eve" and "Halloween".

Actually, NYE was a little sedate this year. It wasn't Times Square or anything, but the crowds were massive. Every bar was packed. At midnight Doris and I stood in the midst of this pack of Hispanic people, including one girl with a giant bag of confetti, and several noisemakers, and the hats and the whole nine. Confetti girl passed out handfuls to everyone, and then laughed at me when I told Doris "Ack! I think I just ate some!" There is still confetti in my foyer. I think it was stuck to my coat or inside my blouse, and when I took those off, there it went.

Doris says Connolly's is usually a very cool Irish pub and we'll have to go there one night when it isn't packed to the Gills. (Get it? Irish Pub packed to the Gills? Ok, Doris didn't make the "Gills" joke, I did, but I thought it was clever.)

On the way home a waitron from the Capital Grille gave Doris and me a bunch of black, white and silver balloons that must have been a table centerpiece because it had one of those sandbags tied at the bottom to weight it. If you ever want to attract a crowd of drunken strangers, carry a wad of balloons down the street in the midst of the drunken revelrie on New Years Eve. We made lots of new "friends".