I can’t believe the weekend is over already. . .

Did you ever see one of your bosses outside work? Did you get that same feeling as when you were a kid and you saw one of your teachers outside school? Like “ohmygawd, they exist outside work / school!”?  Yes, bosses and teachers are real people. . . just odd to picture them outside of the environs you normally picture them. . .so going over their house and having them cook your dinner? A bit surreal.

It was a very tasty dinner, and I cleaned my plate off . . .twice.

***

I’ve started relistening to Scissor Sister’s album  Ta-Dah. . .I brought it about 6 months ago, listened to it and found out that I loved “I Can’t Decide”. . .and that was pretty much it. Sure it was a fun album not one of those gotta listen to it all again and again and again albums like I did with the KT Tunstall (who has a new single out to support her new album coming out next month, check it out on her myspace page) album.

But the Scissor Sister album came up in rotation again (thanks iTunes!), and the first 8 songs on the album now rub me the right way. . .love ‘em. Listen to them again and again and again. . .the song “I Can’t Decide” still gives me a certain thrill, but with those other 7 songs I find myself tapping my foot and doing a little swaying back and forth. . .

Okay, to top it all off, the straight couple that lives above me, the ones that moved in less then a month ago and like to hang pictures at 10:30 pm and have sex at 11pm on a Wednesday, yeah, those ones, they have a dog. A dog that don’t know no better. They took off this evening and that damn dog started to bark. . .and bark.  . . and bark.

Good golly. You think that dog had never been left alone before. Stupid dog. So I grabbed my bike jacket and took of for my first real night ride. Sure, I was out a couple times during dusk, including last night. . .but never when it was dark out. My goggles are amber tinted so they’re no good during night time. So I took my dark sun visor off my helmet and put on my clear plastic visor. This clear visor goes down over my eyes past my nose so I don’t have to wear eye protection.

Before I put it on, I cleaned it up with some windex and it looked halfway decent. But when I went out, it was . . .not really scratched, just the lights from the cars blurred on it and was hard to see through. I didn’t ride that far, just to the local supermarket for milk.

So I ordered myself some clear goggles so I can ride at night without the plastic visor. I like riding during the night – a bit more quiet, a bit more peaceful. . .it was nice.

Until I got back home, and that stupid dog was still barking. Not as much, just occassionally, but still barking. He settled down, but I turned on my fan to drown out what barking remained. If that stupid dog is to go on barking, then word will be sent

I miss Jen. Such a nice relatively quiet upstairs neighbor. . .

Well, I got the same amount of time before 8am as before, but now I just spend the majority of it at home rather then at work. I’ve been making it to work ’bout 7:55am every day this week.  I get up approximately the same time, even though I set the alarm forward a half an hour. I make some coffee, enjoy a nice hot cup of it while I check email, bloglines, etc.

I can take my time and not worry ’bout being late. Not that I worried ’bout being late, but I did worry ’bout rushing around getting there when I normally would.

Nope. No more.

***

The woman who used to live above me left. I thought she was gone on one of her trips that she would go on for a week or so. Well, it’s been over a month and her car never showed back up and I saw  and heard someone above me.

Umm.

Who ever it was, whom ever it was, made a lot of fucking noise. Past 10:30 pm the other night and I heard what sounded like a hammer bangging in nails, putting up pictures all over the place. . .well, more specifically right over my bedroom. Jebus. Finally the hammering moved over the living room and was a little more quiet.

Then the other night I figured out it was two people. I could hear them having sex above me. Never before in the four years I’ve been here did the woman that used to live above me make noise like that. . .it wasn’t moaning or groaning or screaming or nothing like that, just the typical back and forward sound of a bed moving while someone was getting it on old style missionary like. . .

Umm.

Then tonight I heard a ruckus outside my window. So I go to look, and  a few couples were standing out there with their kids and strollers.  Umm. They were just hanging around, drinking something from cups and chatting. Finally it broke up and a young childless couple came inside. . .walked up the stairs and into the apartment above me.

Well fuck me. I’ve got a straight couple who like to have boring missionary sex at 11pm on a weekday. I hope to hell they ain’t having a kid. . .though if they’ll do they’ll move out of the one bedroom apartment they have now.

***

 And don’t get me started on the increase amount of litter outside. Plastic OJ bottles. D&D coffee cups. Straws. Cigarette butts. Have some respect people. Pick up your shit and throw it away. The stuff have been sitting out there at least two days now. I would think the complex’s people driving around in their little golf carts would pick it up. Or one of the people that dropped it would.

Nope. I guess they are are  too good to pick it up.

Normally I’ll stoop over to pick up a piece of garbage, but I’m not going to police the whole parking lot. This crap is insane.

Pick your litter up. Don’t make noise past 10pm. Is it too much to ask? Sometimes I think I need to move on to a ten acre lot with nothing but trees around me.

Seems the Presidential Advance Team has a manual that the ACLU obtained a redacted copy during a lawsuit against the White House, via Pam’s House Blend:

The Bush administration assault on freedom of speech continues, but the government ended up on the short end of the stick this time. Nicole and Jeffery Rank of Corpus Christi, Texas, were handcuffed and tossed out of an Independence Day rally at the West Virginia state Capitol, where Bush delivered a speech. Their “crime”? 

The front of the Ranks’ homemade T-shirts bore the international symbol for “no” superimposed over the word “Bush.” The back of Nicole Rank’s T-shirt said “Love America, Hate Bush.” On the back of Jeffery Rank’s T-shirt was the message “Regime Change Starts at Home.”

A White House spokesman said the $80K settlement was “not an admission of wrongdoing.”

So I went to the ACLU website and got my own copy of the 12 page PDF document “Presidential Advance Manual“.  The majority of the 103 pages were redacted, which makes you wonder when they leave stuff like this in there:

Just what exactly are they leaving out? So we know the President doesn’t like demonstrators. . . You would think he just doesn’t want to be heckled or for to be shouted over so no one can hear his speech. But then later in the document the truth comes out:

If the President is going to be shouted down, they can just turn up the volume on his mike. As for “greater disruption to the event”, good gosh people. This is the President of the United States, if he is afraid that some protesters are going to steal his limelight, then he must not have that high of a self esteem.

No, what they are afraid of is the media seeing them or hearing them and then broadcasting that yes, there are people (lots of them by last count), that don’t agree with what the President says.

So what does the Presidential Advance team do when it is faced with protesters? Why they send their own protesters to “surround and drown out the demonstrators immediately.” Umm. Aren’t they afraid of their “rally squad” over shouting the President or causing a “greater disruption to the event”?  They must not be. So it is okay for their “rally squads” to be loud and disruptive, but not for the people with opinions that don’t match their own.

What little of this document we get to see basically tells us that the President doesn’t want the press to get a whiff of protesters around his events, and that his way of dealing with protesters is to limit their access to him and then to use his own anti-protest protesters in an attempt to cover up the protesters and hide them from the media.  What a scared little man.

So my attempt at being “on time” today ended in distaster.  .  .

Yes, I was in at 7:45am. And that was with sleeping in five minutes past my usual alarm time, though it was 25 minutes before when I had set my alarm to go off. So on Monday I’ll be leaving 15 minutes later. That should do it.

***

Even though I slept in (a whole 5 minutes!), I’m soooo tired  right now.  I usually like to read for a bit before I go to bed, and currently I’m reading the third book in the Ender’s series, Xenocide. But tonight is one of those nights that I can barely keep my eyes open. . .so instead of doing this blog entry or reading Xenocide I’ll be headed off to sleep.

I had a flashback today to high school. You know when the second bell of lunch rings and you better be at your next class, but your next class is study so you take your sweet ass time getting down to the cafeteria for “study hall” (and if you were a senior you wouldn’t even have to show up, but could take the much prized “double lunch”) and when you show up 5 minutes late to sit around and do nothing you get called down to the vice principal’s office to get yelled out for being late to study hall, but while you’re sitting there zoning out during the VP’s ass chewing you look over and see the principal come in from his extra long off campus lunch break. . .and you wonder what the fuck.

We had that moment at work today. An email was sent down from the VP level to all salaried folks about lunch time lengths. . .Nothing like carpet bombing the entire country when you could just use a smart bomb on the one or two camps and take out the terrorists. . .

It was the topic of every discussion and people who don’t normally gossip were gossiping about it: trying to figure out what instigated such an email. Less work probalby got done ’cause everyone was talking about this new hassle. . .hopefully this all blows over. ‘Cause man, was I irrated with the whole deal. I come in anywhere from an hour to an half hour early every day, and they don’t want to give me an extra 5 minutes every day? Bah! I’ll be in at 8am sharp tomorrow. . .perhaps I’ll sleep in tomorrow.

I went to Washington DC with my mom and sister for a long weekend and then last weekend I was on a windjammer cruise up in Maine with a friend. I’m so tired. Well, last night I was so tired. Went to bed at 9:15pm, an hour or so before my normal bed time. . .and then this morning when I woke up I just rolled over and went back to sleep. I still got up before the alarm clock, but it was still a long good sleep.

***

In Washington we saw the normal sights, from Arlington National Cemetery to the Air and Space Muesuem.  We got to see the 7-11 dressed up as Kwik-e-Mart.

It was amazing to stand 5 feet away from the Space Shuttle Enterprise, to see the 3rd Infantry’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier guard walking his 21 steps in front of the tomb, to see the Lincoln Memorial at night such that the white marble seemed to glow in the night sky. . .our nation’s capital is an amazing city, and I wish I could have spent more time down there.

The windjammer cruise was incredible. It was the opposite of one of those big luxury boat “floating hotel” cruises: you could help put up the sails (you didn’t have to if you didn’t want), the toilet and shower was a mess of pedals and cold water and the cups were the size of shot glasses. . .but the snap of the sail in the wind, the creaking of the ropes and the incredibly tight turns as the boat tacks up and down the bay.

Sure, the cabin was so damn small, but the bunk was comfy and I had a good nights sleep in it. The best part of the trip was getting up before most everyone else, and being up on deck with the water so still it was a mirror, the peace and quiet and then at 6:30 am the warm coffee and goodies.  Once everyone was up, the deck got crowded and finding a good spot to sit was difficult.

I highly recommend a windjammer cruise if you have a free weekend. Just remember to bring: a seat cushion / folding “canoe” chairs so your butt doesn’t get sore from sitting on the wooden deck, bottled water or other drink(s) of your choice (they will have an ice chest to keep it cold), a couple books/magazines to sit back and read, even in summer bring a coat / sweatshirt – when the ship gets going it can get chilly on deck, a flashlight in case you want to read downstairs in your cabin at night, and prolly more that I’m forgetting. . .

I can see how people can fall in love with sailing. If I could afford a ship and crew of my own, I’d just sail around all the time. It was a very relaxing time, not too dissimilar to the feeling I get when riding my motorcycle. . .

(above: the sister ship, The Mercantile.)

I had a dream the other night (yeah, don’t we all). . .that I had some implants.

Not those kind of implants, I don’t have any need of those – the girls are large enough as they are. But some stainless steel balls, about 1/4″ to a 1/2″ in diameter, implanted under the skin of my arm. A subdermal implant. I could feel them under my skin, and somehow I could take them out, put them back in and move them around under my skin. It gave an extra feeling to my arm and then I put them in my calf too. It would be cool to get such an implant, but I don’t know if I would get “just” stainless steel balls. They made all kinds of different looking things for subdermal implants, I don’t know what I would get. . .or for that matter where I would get it. Not only where on my body, but where here.

I’d like to get another tattoo too, but the question comes up: what to get? So I’ll wait and think it over. . .maybe a picture of my motorcycle? Heh.

***

I saw the  Simpsons movie. Twice so far. Once on opening weekend and once yesterday. The Spider Pig gag makes me giggle just thinking about it. Funny stuff. Overall the movie felt like a very long episode from season 7 or 8. Some really funny stuff. A few things that they couldn’t get away with on teevee. I tell you want the moments are, but I don’t want to ruin for you. And the animation was great. Sure they used the 2D stuff that the show is known for, but they also used some 3D models that we commonly see on Futurama. And the backgrounds were gorgeous.

There were a few things that had me scratching my head: like why they used Arnold for the president instead of Rainier Wolfcastle? Or that Bart would have anything to do with Flanders? But those are just minor quibbles. This movie is well worth the $10 to see it in the big screen.

***

Figures my body is still on vacation time: sleeping in to 8am, staying up past 11pm. Not so bad on the weekend, but on the weekday the little alarm clock has something to say about it. Sometimes on the weekend the kitty has something to say about it too, but kitty can be ignored, the alarm clock can’t.

Thankfully for me I’m going on one of those windjammer cruises next weekend. Should be fun: just off the coast of Maine on a sailboat. Then at the end of August I get to go see Lewis Black.  That man is a laugh riot. Should be a good time.

It went by so quickly. Here today, gone tomorrow. My mom, my sister and I went to DC to see some sites: Arlington National Cemetery, Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Lee’s House, National Air & Space Museum (the one just outside the city), Lincoln Memorial, etc. My sister got us a good hotel which was just outside the city in Arlington, about a two minute car drive from the Pentagon, which we passed every time we went into the city or out to get something to eat.

We also managed to stop at the “Kwik-E-Mart” in Bladensburg, MD. It was pretty neat to see all the displays of Simpsons, the Simpsons products (i.e. Buzz Cola, pink frosted donuts, Krusty-Os and more) and to see the Simpsons quotes around the store. Though the displays didn’t seem that costly, I don’t understand why they limited it to only 12 7-11s around the country, why there were none in New England (‘specially the Boston area), and how they could under estimate the  demand on these products. There were plenty of goodies at the store we went to, but reports from NYC’s store said they were wiped out.

The trip itself wouldn’t have been possible without our GPS system: Garmin. A very handy device and worth every penny. We could plug in an address and the Garmin would give us verbal and visual guidance in getting to our destination. If we made a wrong turn (as sometimes happened, Garmin’s directions could be confusing at times), then the system would say “recalculating” and give us our new route to take. When the Garmin had trouble locating satellites and I had to use the map, I got us to where we wanted to go, but it was a bit of a pain – I wasn’t able to enjoy the view, and take pictures of the passing scenery as I did when we had Garmin operational.

It was my longest vacation since I was in college, and at only 6 days, still too short. Sure, I get like 15 days a year or some such, which would be 3 work weeks (as we don’t have to put vacation time in for the weekends). . .But I take a day there a day here, and pretty soon my days off are all gone. There should be at least one three day weekend per month to give us full timers a breather. . .one of those if I were president things. . .