Personal

The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.

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?

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!

Thunk drinking

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I feel more like I do now than I did when I got here.

— Graffitti on a bar restroom stall wall, as relayed to me by my co-worker Karen

Memorial Day weekend

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I had a pretty decent Memorial Day weekend — just fairly uneventful, for the most part. Spent most of my time hanging out and relaxing here at the apartment. Laura (pleasure_lil_treasure_99) came and hung out for a while, and I introduced her to the movie AI: Artificial Intelligence.

Other than that, not a whole lot went on…just a fairly nice relaxing 3-day weekend. I’m hoping to be able to leave early from work this Friday to go out and see a show at the Catwalk: KMFDM, Pig, The Kidney Thieves, and 16 Volt! I’m really hoping to be able to make it, but if I can’t, I’ll have a second chance when they come back through in July. Keeping my fingers crossed….

North to Alaska

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Just when I’d reconciled myself to the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to afford to head up to Alaska this summer like I’d been planning to see James and Stacy get hitched, what do some of my friends do but chip in to help me out with the cost of the plane ticket.

Pretty cool, eh? My friends rock. R-A-W-K rawk!

I got the flight confirmation e-mailed to me this morning right before work. As it stands, I’ll be flying out of here at 12:25pm on Friday June 21st, arriving in Anchorage that same day at 3:01pm. I’ll be up there all through the weekend, flying back down Monday night, leaving at 8:30pm and arriving back in Seattle at 12:45am.

In other news, I got two more small packages from my parents. Knowing my sweet tooth all to well, one was a bottle of Nutella. The other made me laugh — a climbers D-ring with a key ring attachment that has a compass attached to it. Given the fact that it came with a note that said, “Don’t get lost!” I’m pretty sure it was inspired by my lamenting my lack of a compass back when I was first trying to find my way around the Microsoft campus.

Y’know — my friends and my parents rock. Too cool.

Birthday presents!

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I’ve got some very silly parents.

I’m sure that this is just an entirely mindblowing revelation, for anyone who knows me well, or has met them.

I got my first box of birthday presents from them a couple days ago. Two items, both of which made me laugh a lot. The first was a black t-shirt bearing the text, “I’m only wearing black until they make something darker.” They know me so well….

The second I’m almost positive was primarily, if not entirely, my mom’s idea. See, my mom has a fascination (and an unhealthy one, at that, in my slightly smart-alecky opinion) with silly little noisemakers — for instance, some of our family trip back in December of 2000 was devoted to searching for things like the “Big Mouth Bass” or whatever that singing fish was that was so popular a while ago. Now, these little gadgets happen to annoy me to pieces, so I teased mom mercilessly about this during the trip.

So what do I get for my birthday? I got a “My Pet Ferret (With realistic Movement and Ferret Chatter) — Touch and Sound Activated!” I laughed pretty hard when I saw that…both because of the teasing I’d given mom over toys of this sort, and because for a time before I moved to Seattle, I used to have two ferrets of my own. So now, every so often, when I make enough noise, I’m greeted with some happy little ferret chatter coming out of the corner of my room where he sits.

As I said — I’ve got very silly parents.

Why I don’t give my phone number to people who fry anymore.

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3:45 am:

RIIIING…RIIIING…RIIING…

“Hello?”

“I just saw Gurbymurble!”

“You saw who? Who the hell is this?”

“James! I saw Gurbymurble!”

“Who the hell is Gurbymurble?”

“That Russian dude!”

“You mean Gorbachov?”

“Yeah, that dude!”

“You’re calling me at 3:45 in the morning to say you saw Gorbachov on TV?!”

“No man, not on TV! I saw the dude at the 7-11!”

“What the hell would Gorbachov be doin’ at the Darkville 7-11?”

“He was buyin’ a pack of smokes!”

“The only reason Mikhail Gorbachov would be the 7-11 buying a pack of smokes at 3:45 in the morning is beause you dropped five hits of acid at midnight and have in fact seen Willy tryin’ to hold up the store again. What, praytell, did this Mr. Gorbachov look like?”

“Uh, he was a tall black dude holding a .45.”

“And when was the last time you saw Gorbachov holding a .45?”

“Tonight at the 7-11!”

“Uh-huh….”

“Hey dude! It’s almost 4! What are you doin’ up?”

“I’m talking to a moron.”

“Aw fuck him! Listen, you won’t believe what I saw!”

“You saw a black Mikhail Gorbachov holding up the 7-11….”

“DUDE! Did I tell you about that?”

“Yes. Yes you did, thank you.”

“I saw a 400 pound spider eat a cop!”

“Oh? And where did this little atrocity happen? Not at the 7-11 by any chance?”

“No, man, on channel 31! It’s a movie called ‘A Big Ol’ Fuckin’ Spider Eats a Cop.'”

“More like ‘5 Hits of Acid Eats a Loadie’s Brain.'”

“I haven’t had 5 hits of acid!”

“My sincerest apologies….”

“I’ve had 6!”

“Hang up the phone or I’m giving the Jehovah’s Witnesses your address.”

“Who do you think I got the 6 hits from?!”

SLAM!!!

Why blog?

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Some days I sit back and wonder just why I do this. My site doesn’t get a whole lot of traffic — primarily just my folks and a few friends who stop by from time to time when they remember. And, admittedly, much of what I write probably wouldn’t be of any real interest to the world in general. Bits and pieces of my life, what I’m doing, what’s going on. Heck, I don’t even get personal enough most of the time to make for any real good drama!

I found the following quote over on Peach’s site after she left a comment to one of my posts, and it seemed to sum up fairly accurately why I keep banging away at this — because, whether or not it’s seen all that often…it’s fun.

I am very pleased with my (o.k. and yours too) blogger. I feel like I have fallen down the rabbit hole; just falling and falling in a blissful state, sans the drugs. I love IT! It is peering through my own looking glass at my own ego and my written word. Whether you are an amatuer or a professional; whether you are an exquisite artiste or you stink, it makes no difference. Most people who create at some time or another, have a strong sense of who they are in the images they create. Mediocrity is the scare word for us. Your word or my word, we all checked off ‘public’ for a reason. We would like to be read and responded to.

Sometimes, though, I feel that I shouldn’t be ‘published’ unless I am very, very good. And then again, who cares? It’s my Journal and if you want to read it, be my guest.

Ugh

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In brief — I saw Spiderman, it rocked. More later. I’m currently battling off a really nasty flu bug…hence why no updates for a few days, and only this really short note right now before I curl up in bed.

I’ll get more up when being vertical doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. ;)