Countdown…
Some results of my Political Junkie Tour of Belle Meade above. Really couldn’t get a bead on Algore’s house; too many trees. It’s big. Frist’s is ginormous.
Okay, here’s the shed-yule:
Today:
8:30 Vet appointment — yay, we’re getting wormed!
11:00 Movers
6:00 A friend picks me up to take a last box to FedEx and have dinner
Tomorrow:
First thing: empty and clean the fridge, tidy generally
11:00 Real estate agent picks me up
11:30 Closing
3:00 Cat dropped at freight place
9:00 Our mutual plane leaves
2:15 (7:15 local time) We arrive at Heathrow. Clearing a cat through takes 3-4 hours. Don’t ask me why.
6:00 (11:00) My driver arrives.
?
Profit!
Deep breath — here we go! I’m shutting down this machine…
November 24, 2008 — 7:53 am
Comments: 50
Rub weasel on your behbeh
Turns out Mustela is a kind of French skin cream for infants. Who knew? They have a whole range of products, but I’m having problems with my Flash plugins so my browsers throw up on the website.
Yep. I got nothing.
Rushed a PowerPoint out the door for somebody today and had a mover’s estimator show up and case the joint. If you’d told me a year ago that all my worldly possessions would fit into a container ten foot by ten foot by seven foot, I’d go, “pff! Yeah! If you leave it on the surface of a really high-gravity planet for like a year until all the atoms smoosh together into some super-dense Weaselium alloy. Yeah. Maybe then.”
But it turns out, 80% of my precious shit was shit. And now it sits on a landfill somewhere, its sightless eyes staring up forever into the wide, empty sky. China, maybe. Or Arizona. Or the Atlantic. Where does our shit go, anyhow?
People keep asking me if it’s a liberating feeling, tossing my shit. It is…but in a horrible, nihilistic way. It’s the liberation of watching your house burn down. It’s the liberation of knowing that everything you have amassed in a lifetime that is worth a damn would fit in a 10x10x7 container. And half of that is probably kind of crap.
But enough poopies! Now that my visa has arrived at the Embassy, I really — finally! — feel quite happy. A little anxious still, but it’s dawned on me…I will wake up to an alarm clock five more times in my life.
Not that I’ve slept until the alarm for years and years, but it’s the idea, man. The idea.
November 13, 2008 — 5:55 pm
Comments: 24
Boxes. Boxes. Boxes. Boxes. Boxes. Boxes.
November 8, 2008 — 8:23 am
Comments: 25
Na. Na. Nananana. No. No. Nana nono nana nono. Pinned for November.
NaNoWriMo thread, if you want it. NaNoWriMo thread, if you don’t. The likely lad who’s buying Stoat Acres got his mortgage confirmation, so I shall be rawther busy for a while (just kidding! I’ll probably post more than usual. I babble when I’m nervous).
November 7, 2008 — 8:40 am
Comments: 42
Step away. From the news. NOW.
Absolutely no analysis you read or hear in the immediate aftermath of this election will be accurate. Except this one, of course. Duh.
I live in the most reliably blue state in the country. All my friends are lefties (art school! What a great idea!). I’ve been in this place many times. It is not a nice place, but every political junkie gets a turn in the box now and then.
We ran a dreadful candidate with a dreadful campaign at a dreadful time and we got good and beaten. But we didn’t get drubbed. And that is very, very interesting. We’ll think about that. Later.
But now is the Time of the Gloating , and you really don’t need a dose of that. So just…don’t do it to yourself. Don’t go there. Nothing to be gained. Stay off the news sites. Have you seen how much great radio is being streamed these days? How many books available on Project Gutenberg have you always meant to read? How about now?
A jet fuel truck rolled over on I-95 this morning, and my boss won’t be in for hours. There’s always something good, if you aren’t the guy driving the truck.
November 6, 2008 — 8:47 am
Comments: 82
It’s NaNoWriMo time again!
Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.
Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.
Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.
I tried it several years ago. I got several days and six hundred words in before I gave up. But the experience sure taught me something: I suck. I write incredibly worthless fiction. I pretty much knew that, but some lessons you don’t learn on the first try. Pity, because I’d’ve liked to be a novelist.
NaBloPoMo is really more my style. Not that I plan to squeeze out a
blog post every day in November, either. I like it because it sounds like
“blow me” when I say it in my head.
October 28, 2008 — 1:04 pm
Comments: 59
Dear British Embassy: not good at paperwork, draw picture instead?
Ugh. Starting to assemble stuff for my first visa application. But not my last!
October 25, 2008 — 10:06 am
Comments: 22
Because not everyone has the gift of plumb…
Yeah, it’s not nearly as euphonious as the original. But I felt left out. Finally, populist sloganeering for artards and gay guys!
Happy Friday, everyone! Feel free to continue talking about the economy or fragging zombie vampire kittehs, or whatever we were talking about…
October 24, 2008 — 5:04 pm
Comments: 46
A public service announcement
If you’re wondering why I make such a frakking big deal out of it, see…WordPress has this automatic blogroll dingus that I can access from the control panel, but it does moron things like files blogs that begin with “The” under “T” — which just crawls all over my OCD. So I had the bright idea that I’d put the left and right sidebar blogrolls into separate .php files, which is just so thrillingly tidy.
Except WP puts themes inside a folder inside a folder inside a folder inside a www area, all of which I have to access through BlueHost’s control panel, which is slow as shit and I can only get at it from home. Look it involves clicking the mouse button several times, okay?
So I added in the add-ees, moved the move-ees. I deleted links to anything that hadn’t been updated in more than a couple of months — no offense. I really do try do read all this stuff and I am just too stupid to remember who doesn’t update very often. If you get active again, say the word and you get back on. Also I added a couple of people, like JuliaM and Jill, who didn’t ask for it but made the mistake of commenting on my blog with a URL. Dumb move, ladies. You want moving, removing or adding, speak now while I still have those stupid pages open.
Oh, and new rule: weasel-themed blogs — or just plain blogs with ‘weasel’ in the title — get automatic linkage. Because weasels stick together.
If we were cleaner animals, that probably wouldn’t happen so much.
October 23, 2008 — 5:49 pm
Comments: 38
A smut too far
Goodbye, McGoo! I mean, not literally. I’m sure the ‘sphere’ll have McGoo to kick around for quite some time, but it looks like Aardvarks and Asshats has joined the choir eternal. I reckon it was all them fake titties and Photoshopped butts wot did it, McGoo. Naughty, naughty McGoo. You boys’ll have to go elsewhere for your smut dose anymore. [UPDATE: looks like it’s working again. I know McGoo had an email in to them. Perhaps they had mercy.]
Damn it. Now I’ll have to edit my blogroll. And y’all know what a drama queen I am about editing my blogroll. Hey, while I’m in there — anybody want on or off, let me know. Drop me a note or post a comment in this thread and I’ll do that thing (specify moron, weasel or other). Fair warning: if I link your blog, I’ll read it and make inappropriate remarks on it. On the other hand, my blog gets…oh, hundreds of hits, some days.
The Glorious Lemur King sent me this lil’ feller on the left. I believe LK questions the political acumen of this mustelid — but, really, who seeks voting advice from a weasel? Nobody, that’s who. “Shiny stuff: delightful or thrilling?” or “Rat pie: too rich for every day?” maybe. Voting advice, not so much.
I’m far more disturbed by this little BFF, linked by JuliaM. Black-footed ferret — the only species of wild ferret left, and hella endangered. In fact, they were believed to be extinct at one point, until the Smithsonian found a stash of them. (Is there anything the Smithsonian hasn’t got a stash of?)
So “yay” for the tiny weasel, I guess. Only…this adorable fuzzball was hatched out of ten year old frozen ferret sperm. Oh. Ohhhhhhh.
Frozen.
Ferret.
Sperm.
That is so very, very wrong. And it raises so many, many questions. I’d say more, but I don’t want my blog to get McGoo’d.
— 8:22 am
Comments: 76