Month: June 2002

I used to have fingerprints

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Saturday was a fun day. At least, it was if you consider that I’m using ‘fun’ in the most bitterly sarcastic way humanly possible.

I spent five and a half hours crawling around on the floor of an apartment, using 80-grade sandpaper (incredibly rough stuff) to sand paint and plaster splotches off of the hardwood floor that we uncovered after pulling the carpet up last weekend. By the end of it, my hands were rubbed raw, fingers were blistered…all in all, while the end result was nice to see, the process of getting there was severely un-fun.

Then, when I was done and Melvin came down to check it out, he said, “next time I’ll dig out my electric sander, and it won’t be that hard on your hands!”

I really think homicide would have been justified at that point. (Un?)fortunately, I didn’t want to see if I could grip anything enough to actually try.

This, incidentally, is why it took until tonight to start tossing posts up on the page again. I haven’t wanted to spend a whole lot of time typing for the past few days! But, I’m back now…woohoo?

Americans are never this nice

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I think this’ll be my last post for tonight…though, with me, you never know. I heard about this while we had the radio at work on to the Lionel Show, one of the talk shows on The Buzz, a local talk-radio station.

The original story was from the New York Times — “Where 9/11 News Is Late, but Aid Is Swift” (as the NYT site requires registration, and many people would rather not do that, I’ll include the article at the end of this post also). Basically, an African Masai tribesman who was visiting New York at the time of the 9/11 attacks went back to his tribe and, as they’re fairly cut off from the world, explained to them what had happened and how it had affected life here in America.

The tribe, then, felt that they wanted to do something to help — and so they took donations from members of the tribe, and are donating 14 head of cattle to the United States of America! I was just amazed at this — this is a fairly small tribe (the article mentions that a catastrophe that killed 3,000 people would be enough to wipe out their entire tribe) — 14 cattle is, by their standards, an amazing amount of wealth to give up freely! I’m not exactly sure how it would translate to our standards…possibly roughly equivalent to donating Texas to another country. Or Bill Gates. Whichever is worth more.

Anyway, I just thought it was one of the neatest stories I’d read in a long time, and while it may be incredibly bitter and jaded, I really can’t see us in the US doing anything like that. A shame, really — good to know that there are still some places in the world that seem to have their priorities straight.

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Kidney Thieves/16 Volt/KMFDM/Pig

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Well, it took a few days for me to get off my lazy butt and actually put anything up on my page — but the concert I went to on Friday night kicked much ass!

Work let me leave early in order to catch the show, so I took the 6:20 bus back into Seattle from Redmond and got home about 7pm. Laura showed up here about the same time (as she’d picked up the tickets a few days before), and we wandered down to the Catwalk Club right about 8pm. The club is interesting, in a very grungy (as in dirty, not the music genre) sort of way — a sprawling, dimly-lit basement, more or less (there are QuickTime VR pictures of the club available, if you have QuickTime installed on your computer — good pictures, but the club didn’t look nearly that clean to me). Once there, we met up with Rick, Chad, James, Ron, Kim and Kayo.

The KidneyThieves were the first band. Rick turned me on to them back when we were in Anchorage, and had seen them before. They put on a short, but fairly good show — not the best live performance I’ve seen, but far from the worst — much of the problems were more due to sound difficulties (this was the first show of this tour) than to anything with the KT’s performance. Free, the lead singer, is absolutely drop dead gorgeous, which was definitely made watching the band that much more fun — Rick had told me she was, but there’s a definite difference between being told that, seeing pictures, and actually getting to see her in person! After their set the band sat at their merchandise booth and Rick introduced me to Free (he’d met her the last time he saw them) — I made a goob of myself, fairly predictably, but that’s okay. I’m used to it.

Next up was 16 Volt. Not much to say here, except that I’m glad I wasn’t there to see them — most of us spent their set sitting in the bar, talking and having a few drinks. I think Kayo (Kim’s husband) and one of his friends were the only ones from our little group to actually go out and watch them.

The headliner act, though, was well worth the night! Pig and KMFDM took the stage together, and (aside from the aforementioned sound quirks here and there) put on one hell of a show. While I’m normally quite content with staying towards the outskirts of things, this time I was in just the right mood to dive right into the middle of the crowd right in front of the stage! While I did my best to stay out of the pits that appeared, I got dragged/shoved in from time to time…but then, that’s part of the fun right? All in all, I got clocked upside the head a few times (once by an elbow, and once by a foot), got my toes landed on quite a few times, got a good few bruises on my sides from flying elbows — and had an absolute blast!

Once the show was gone, Chad, Laura and I went up to IHOP for breakfast — we waited around for everyone else for a bit, but never did find them (I’ve since found out that Rick went off with James and Ron, who didn’t want to wait for us to come out…Kim and Kayo just disappeared somewhere along the line). After breakfast, time for home and bed.

Great show, though — and they’ll be back in July, so if all goes well, I’ll be able to see them then, too!

Gotta love living somewhere that actually has good shows!