Life

Rock on — according to Dad, Kevin and Emily will be moving to Oregon in a bit, so that Emily can attend Oregon State University in Corvalis. My bro will be in fairly easy visiting distance again!

iTunes: “And It Stoned Me” by Morrison, Van from the album Moondance (1969, 4:34).

I really, really really hate the fact that electronic banking transactions can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few days to post to a bank account.

A few days ago, I withdrew a little money from my bank account, and saw that I had just a bit over \$130 left. A little low, but nothing I couldn’t get by on, and I get paid on Friday.

I just checked my account — and I’m quite thoroughly fuckered. A few transactions from early last week that I thought had gone through already just got posted, along with the direct withdrawl I’d set up to pay my taxes. Unfortunately, the bigger charges went through first (of course), so in addition to dipping under my balance, I also just got hit with a ton of overdraft fees — and my account now has a balance of negative \$363.83.

On the bright side, I get paid Friday. It should be a good paycheck, too — I’ll have my full 40 hours for both weeks, plus eleven hours of overtime, plus I just got a 21 cent raise that will kick in on this check. So, come Friday morning when the direct deposit kicks in, I should be back in the black (though it may only be by a few hundred dollars by that point).

On the down side…well, most obviously, I hate that I goofed up my finances (especially this badly) again. I also have to make it through ’til Friday morning with no cash (tight, but doable, as I’ve got a credit card that isn’t quite maxed out). The biggest bummer, though, is that I’ve been planning on getting my new camera with this paycheck — and that’s obviously not going to happen now.

Important note to Dad, Kirsten, and Phil: My ‘net bill is due this week. Obviously, I’m not going to be able to pay it before Friday morning, so at this point, there is a strong possibility that my ‘net connection may go down temporarily sometime in the next couple days. Should that happen, djwudi.com, [geek*muffin], Among Other Things and The Hanscom Family Weblog will go down. The service interruption shouldn’t be for more than a day, two at the very most, depending on how soon Speakeasy decides to give me the smackdown for running late on their bill. You have my sincere apologies — every time I think I’m getting back on top of things, something else comes along and proves me wrong.

Overall, things are getting better, and I’m not nearly as stressed about money matters as I have been in the past. Even with this, I know it’s just for a couple days, and the upcoming paycheck will resolve the situation. I’ll just have another couple weeks of tightening my belt to get through. Damn if it isn’t frustrating, though.

iTunes: “Feels Like Heaven” by Fiction Factory from the album Pop and Wave Vol. 2 (1983, 3:29).

I just broke my store.

I generally come in the back door when I get here. Today, after unlocking the door to get in, when I pulled my key out of the lock the entire tumbler came with it.

So now my key has the tumbler still attached to it, and the back door can’t be unlocked from the outside.

What will be really entertaining is when my manager gets back from lunch, parks in back…and can’t get in the store.

Whee!

Happy Easter, folks.

You may just have to bear with me here. I’m at work today (boo — filling in for a co-worker who made plans for the day when we thought we’d be closed for Easter), stuck in a store with no customers and no work, looking out through the windows at the sun.

Bored.

And whining.

Then, to top it all off, I’ve just spent some time browsing LiveJournals and going through the various “Friends” pages and skimming through what I find. Man oh man, is that a different world than my usual reads. Of course, having immersed myself in LJ entries for the past hour or so, my brain is somewhat stuck in “LJ” mode, and now I get to subject all of you to a long, rambling, disjointed post about absolutely nothing of import whatsoever. ;)

(LJ users, please don’t take offense at that. Yes, I’m teasing. No, it’s not entirely serious. There’s plenty of content on LJ pages — but the stereotype of “LJ = angst-ridden teenybopper” is just so much fun to play with…!)

(Besides, I used to be an angst-ridden teenybopper, and I shudder to think of what I might have written at that stage of my life if weblogs, LiveJournals, or the like had been around at that time. Ick.)

Memo to me, just in case I get suckered into working here next Easter Sunday: bring a bag luch. Virtually nothing is open in Georgetown on Easter Sunday, and I had an hour long lunch break to kill. Ended up grabbing an overpriced sandwich from Starbucks and wandering around in the sun for a while. Turns out that while the main drags in Georgetown offer little to the eye other than light industrial, warehouses, and run-down buildings, if you go just a street or two over, there are some really cute neighborhoods around here, and some houses that — were I in the housing market, which I’m nowhere near — I could easily be tempted by. I’m thinking that once I have a camera again, I may want to grab a sunny weekend like this one and come down to wander around and explore the area more than I have so far.

Question for any Seattlites that might be reading this that know the town better than I do — is Georgetown really that bad? It seems like every time I mention that I work in the Georgetown area, people cringe. Okay, so it’s run down, and I see the occasional drunk wandering around, but that’s hardly something unheard of in other areas of the city. What causes the instant “oh, I’m sorry” reaction? Is there a sky-high crime rate here that I have somehow managed to miss in the past four-plus months of wandering around after dark each night on my way home? Is my victimless state just pure luck, destined to go the way of the dodo at some point, leaving me crumpled in a gutter somewhere after some local hoodlum makes off with the \$7 and a free pass to the Vogue’s fetish night that they’re likely to find in my wallet? I don’t even have a hat n’ boots for them to steal….

Inquiring minds want to know.

This store’s Muzak system only has two channels: 50’s and 60’s, and 70’s-80’s-90’s. It’s been on the 70’s-80’s-90’s channel nearly continuously since the store opened (and by opened, I mean opening day, not unlocking the doors this morning), but today I figured out how to change the channel to the one other choice I have (I’m so smart…S-M-R-T…). I have to admit, the selection isn’t nearly as bad as it could be, though the mere fact that it’s not the same stuff I’ve been listening to for the past four months is good enough in itself that the actual music could be nearly anything and I’d be thrilled.

I’ve been finding myself less and less motivated to post about the stuff I run across each day on the ‘net. Let’s face it — I get my links from all the same usual suspects as nearly every weblogger on the ‘net (BoingBoing, MetaFilter, Slashdot, Daily Kos, Eschaton, etc.), and I just don’t have the time to randomly troll the ‘net at large in hopes of finding something that hasn’t been linked to by everyone else yet, so the chances of finding anything original is slim to none. On top of that, the majority of what I post can pretty much be summed up thusly:

Good: Gay marriage, equal rights, tolerance, Macintosh, wacky humor, music, movies. Bad: bigotry, racism, homophobia, Windows, George Bush et. al., the war.

And there you have it: the Readers Digest Condensed Cliffs Notes version of my weblog. Fascinating, isn’t it?

It’s probably a bad sign when I start to bore myself.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that I’m likely to stop anytime soon, boring or not. I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing — or just indifferent — but somehow, I just don’t see myself closing up shop and walking away. I’m just not sure that I’m really contributing that much, and if that’s the case, where do I want to go from here?

I’m not open enough with the world in general to suddenly go overly personal. While I don’t mind occcasionally mentioning bits and pieces of my life on here, I’m not the type to post every last little detail of my life — what I had for lunch, little daily annoyances, relationship ups and downs, orgasmic expertise, or the like — while I’ll admit that there are times that it’s a little tempting to give that a shot, I’m just not that comfortable being that open. If that means that what ramblings I do put up are a little more boring, a little less titillating, a little less exhibitionistic than other sites out there…well, sorry. Barring a sudden major personality transplant, that much is fairly unlikely to change much, if at all.

At the same time, though, having said that…sometimes it’s definitely tempting.

Just don’t hold your breath.

Hrm. Anyway. I think I’ve just about run out of steam for the moment. Just over two hours left to go, then it’s homeward bound, see if I can slam my laundry through the washroom if it hasn’t been taken over by other tenants already, and then off to the Vogue for tonight’s Fetish Night.

The excitement never stops, I tell you…

I mentioned briefly a few months ago that I was thinking about letting my hair grow out — at least until it got to a point where I get sick of fighting with the inevitable curls and shave it all off again.

I figured today that as I’ve now made it through just over three months without a haircut, I might as well post a “status update” on the experiment, and took this snapshot with my iSight. This should also reassure mom that yes, I do still have curls when my hair gets long enough. ;) You can see them starting to flip up just above my ears.

iTunes: “It’s Going Down” by Blackalicious feat. Lateef the Truth Speaker/Wyatt, Keke from the album Blazing Arrow (2002, 3:44).

Today’s mom’s birthday!

Happy birthday, mom, and many more to come. :)

I saw a guy walking down the street outside of the club this weekend wearing a Utilikilt “baggy style.”

With the beltline around his hips, and boxers sticking up over the waistband.

That’s just so, so wrong.

iTunes: “Trumpets of Dawn” by Discordia from the album Essential Chillout (1999, 3:41).

“Uncle Bud”, my great-uncle, passed away last week.

Byron E. Wilson, 84, Martinsville [Indiana], died at 1:35 a.m. on Sunday, March 28, 2004, at his residence.

Born Nov. 2, 1919, in Morgan County, he was the son of Earl O. and Bessie Maree (Hamilton) Wilson. He married Margaret E. (Reynolds) Wilson Nov. 29, 1941. She survives.

Wilson was a mail carrier in Martinsville for 37 years, retiring in 1980.

He was a member of First Christian Church in Martinsville, American Legion Post 230, Veteran of Foreign Wars Post 1257, volunteer firefighter and treasurer for the Green Township Fire Department. He was a 1937 Martinsville High School graduate.

He drove School of Hope children through the Red Cross and was a veteran of the Army Air Force during World War II.

He enjoyed playing music and was an avid gardener.

Other survivors include a son, James Earl Wilson, Gosport; daughters, Judy Arend, Madison, Wis., Donna Dickison, Martinsville, Kathy Davenport, Flemingsburg, Ky., Patti Wiggins, Martinsville and Karen Parks, Monrovia and 10 grandchildren, Michelle Bailey, Shaun and Michael Arend, Amber Wilson, Matthew, Daniel, Joseph and Benjamin Wiggins and Rebecca and Sara Davenport.

A sister, Mary Flora Hanscom, and a great-grandchild preceded him in death.

As I grew up in Alaska, my memories of Uncle Bud are limited to the times we went down to Indiana to visit dad’s side of the family. My grandmother’s home was just next door to Uncle Bud and Aunt Peg (if I’m remembering correctly, her house was actually on his property), only a few minutes walk across a field from one door to the other.

All the memories I have of him, though, are pleasant ones — a friendly, smiling, older man, watching all the various kids and grandkids of his family run around during our visits. I believe at one point he let me drive his riding lawnmower around the field, resulting in little actual mowing, and culminating in the unfortunate wounding of an innocent tree when I failed to turn quite when I should.

Bye, Uncle Bud. You’ll be missed.